A San Francisco prisoner wanted to read werewolf erotica so badly that he took it to state court. The case has brought up problems with prison censorship and calls to mind Avi Steinberg’s memoir, Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (here’s our review.)
Howling Against Censorship
Les Mosquees
Recommended Reading: Adam Shatz on Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission.
The Deep Also Impacts
Those of you out there who grew up in the 90s will remember that every disaster movie brought a slew of novelizations into bookstores. Even if the movie in question did badly, you knew that at least two adaptations of the script would pop up on shelves. At Hazlitt, Will Sloan wonders if the age of the novelization is over.
Tivoli Gardens
“Marlon James’s management of the voice and the paragraph isn’t what you’d call unpretty, and he’s good at having it both ways on a larger scale too. Reptilian black-ops masterminds out of a Robert Stone novel as well as bumbling CIA bureaucrats, baroque deaths in the bush and casual killings by the side of the road, historical and magic realism, sex and violence and a more ‘sophisticated kind of art’: the guy’s got it all.” This review of James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings from The London Review of Books is well worth the read.
Color It Away
Need to relax? Check out an adult coloring book. Sales have skyrocketed in the past two years. Coloring books could stifle creativity instead of helping it grow, though.
John Carey on William Golding
In The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews John Carey’s biography William Golding: The Man Who Wrote “Lord of the Flies”: “It may not be a surprise to learn that the British novelist … did not have a happy childhood. But the details will put a sweat on your forehead.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Jin; Saizarbitoria; Jackson; Carson; Conroy; Boyle
Out this week: The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin; Martutene by Ramón Saizarbitoria; Black Elk by Joe Jackson; Float by Anne Carson; A Lowcountry Heart by Pat Conroy; and The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.