Photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai, a Yakuza group headquartered on the Kyushu island of Japan. “My mental note to myself,” says Jue, “was ‘once I step foot into their property, anything can happen.’”
Deep In Yakuza Territory
Digital Textbook Rentals
Amazon is going to start allowing Kindle users to “rent” textbooks. The best part? You can keep your notes after the book is returned.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hunt; Gerrard; Molina; Osborne; Jacobson; Greer
Out this week: The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt; The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard; Like A Fading Shadow by Antonio Muñoz Molina; Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne; The Dog’s Last Walk by Howard Jacobson; and Less by Andrew Sean Greer. For more on these and other new titles, go read our just-published book preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day
New this week stateside is buzzed-about Booker shortlister Room by Emma Donoghue. Also out: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, a new collection by “20 Under 40” lister Yiyun Li; Sigrid Nunez’s post-apocalyptic Salvation City; and a McSweeney’s-published memoir Half a Life by Chang and Eng author Darin Strauss.
A Bit Rusty
Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this — who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prose pick greats that are no longer great.
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Unofficial
For Perry Link, it was embarrassing to read Eileen Chang for the first time, because her work revealed things about China it took him too long to learn on his own. In The New York Review of Books, he writes about how Naked Earth, which the magazine’s publishing arm is republishing in June, cut through the jargon of Chairman Mao’s regime. FYI, Jamie Fisher wrote an essay on the book for The Millions.
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Crunching the Reading Numbers
Some cool number-crunching from Millions staff writer Patrick at the Goodreads blog. As we’ve long suspected, reading isn’t all about “new,” and the data shows a long tail of older books that are still high on people’s reading lists.
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Edwin Frank Interview
Vince Manapat’s interview with NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank provides an interesting (if slightly erroneous) history of how the publisher got started. If you come away from the interview wondering what Mr. Frank recommends reading, then, ta-da! and look no further.