If you find cat hair in a book you checked out of the Novorossiysk Library, don’t worry. It belongs to the newest librarian. Kuzya the cat started off as a pet at the Russian library but was promoted after patronage increased due to his presence. The new library assistant even wears a bow tie.
Kitty Lit
P.T. Anderson Wants to Direct Pynchon Novel
Vulture reports that Paul Thomas Anderson wants to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice for the big screen.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Larson, Nesbø, Brown, Earle, Udall, Marlantes
Purveyor of popular nonfiction Erik Larson has a new book out this week, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. The Snowman by Jo Nesbø is a new entry in the increasingly popular Scandinavian thriller genre. Inward-looking graphic novelist Chester Brown’s latest, Paying for It is out, and musician and actor Steve Earle can now add “novelist” to his resume with the release of I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. And new in paperback are a pair of big books, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn.
Scathing ‘New York Times’ Book Reviews
Read some of the harshest New York Times book reviews on literary classics, including Lolita, Ulysses, and The Catcher in the Rye.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ball; Flanery; MacMahon; Raabe; Feldman; Ryan; Hebert
New this week: How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball; I Am No One by Patrick Flanery; The Long, Hot Summer by Kathleen MacMahon; The Trap by Melanie Raabe; Absalom’s Daughters by Suzanne Feldman; The Dream Life of Astronauts by Patrick Ryan; and Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert.
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New Borges Editions
These new Penguin Classics editions of Jorge Luis Borges’ essays and poetry make a nice set, with the covers of each of the five books displaying a different rendering of Borges’ portrait.
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An Anonymous Evangelical Poetry Fan
In what might be the first sighting of its kind, an anonymous evangelical poetry fan has made an appearance in the comments of Elizabeth Lucy Conway’s recent essay on teaching poetry.
“A blood-sworn fan”
“So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it’s more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me.” Talking with Karen Russell.
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