The New York Times unveiled a new music blog entitled Press Play. Each week, the blog will “present tracks from an upcoming new album.”
Press Play
Tuesday New Release Day: Levertov; Tolstoy; Freud
New this week: The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov; a new translation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; and the complete letters of Sigmund Freud.
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Paper Trail
Edinburgh’s latest whodunnit wasn’t written by Ian Rankin. The Scottish capital’s mysterious book sculptor has struck again. Last summer, she started anonymously leaving paper sculptures at literary locations around the city to promote free access to libraries, museums, and galleries. The latest artwork arrived at the Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature Trust and includes paper feather wings, a safety helmet, and goggles “to provide some protection throughout journey.”
And Still I Rise
Via Galleycat we’re watching the just-released trailer for the upcoming documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, which is scheduled to air on October 14th on PBS. Pair with this beautiful in memoriam we published upon her passing in 2014.
Introducing Flannery O’Connor
Adrian Van Young at Electric Literature has compiled a reading primer for the works of Flannery O’Connor. Pair with Nick Rapatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter.”
Non-Issues
“As a gay man, I would argue that gender and sexual identities are irrelevant, complete non-issues.” Alexandre Vidal Porto talks with our own Bruna Dantas Lobato about Brazilian fiction, gender identity, and his second novel, Sergio Y., at BOMB Magazine.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sayles, Mieville, Theroux, Habila, Drabble, Donoghue, Cronin
The huge, McSweeney’s-published, John Sayles novel A Moment in the Sun has been getting great reviews. It’s now out. Also new this week is China Mieville’s Embassytown, reviewed here today; Paul Theroux’s exploration of the genre of travel writing, The Tao of Travel; prizewinning Nigerian author Helon Habila’s new novel Oil on Water; and A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, the complete stories of Margaret Drabble, recently written up by Joyce Carol Oates in the New Yorker. New in paperback are a pair of Millions Hall of Famers, Emma Donoghue’s Room and Justin Cronin’s The Passage.
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“I don’t love women writers enough to teach them.”
Millions alumna Emily M. Keeler interviewed author David Gilmour for Hazlitt’s Shelf Esteem blog. In the process (and perhaps because he was distracted by “a Frenchman”) the author voiced some opinions on female authors that have been called “ill-informed,” “careless and offensive,” and “staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial.” The ongoing kerfuffle prompted Hazlitt to share the unedited transcript from Keeler’s interview, and it’s clear that Gilmour’s remarks were not taken out of context.