New this week: All That Is by James Salter, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn, The Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, and Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perisic.
Tuesday New Release Day: Salter, Atkinson, Maazel, Kushner, Shearn, Rich, Perisic
Tuesday New Release Day: Smith; Campbell; Moore; Brooks; Marra; Ōe; Niffeneger
Out this week: M Train by Patti Smith; Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore; The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe; and Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Audrey Niffenegger. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Zooey Deschanel on New Girl
Every Wednesday, Vanity Fair bloggers dissect Zooey Deschanel’s performance on New Girl and quantify each quirk as “adorkable” or “tweepulsive.”
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New McEwan
We recently linked to a new interview with Ian McEwan, whose latest novel The Children Act comes out next week. The LA Times has a full review of the new book, and the piece pairs well with Charles-Adam Foster-Simard's review of McEwan's Sweet Tooth. And of course there's Atonement, which comes up in a variety of Millions articles, from Michael David Lukas's essay on the polyphonic novel to Seth Sawyer's recent piece on food and reading.
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The School of Life
"There is something ersatz, if not quite fraudulent, about [Alain] de Botton's entire intellectual enterprise." At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lisa Levy throws down the gauntlet.
Most Time Is Upside Down
"I HAVE A FLOWER. OHO. SUDDENLY WE’RE NOT SO SKEPTICAL, ARE WE?" I know it's 2016 and he's been dead for almost two hundred years now, but these otherwise inexplicable texts from Samuel Coleridge (by way of Mallory Ortberg at The Toast) are hilarious and totally believable. Some earlier hits include texts from Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy.
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Who Taught It Best
"He is a man who has written a lot about politics and knows something about expectation-setting — set the bar low, and it’ll be easy to top it." The Awl rounds up its review series of online Masterclasses with such esteemed personages as Aaron Sorkin, James Patterson, and Werner Herzog. See also: our own Sonya Chung's review of Sorkin's film The Social Network.
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David Simon Working on a Pogues Musical
The Wire creator David Simon is at work on a Pogues musical, reports Rolling Stone. Where will they possibly find a Broadway star with the right teeth to play Shane MacGowan?
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