To celebrate the 80th birthday of Kirkus Reviews, the editorial staff is holding a contest in which the grand prize winner gets a literary tour of New York City. This includes “two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.”
New Contest from Kirkus Reviews
Another Launch from Flatmancrooked
Starting today, you can launch occasional Millions writer James Kaelan and his book, We're Getting On, a "composite novel" (made up of two stories and two novellas, all thematically linked). And because this is part of his Zero-Emissions Book Project, Kaelan will promote his book by bike on a cross-country reading tour.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Sekaran; Lopate; Coover; Schweblin; Peelle; D’Agostino; Zhang; Doctorow
Out this week: Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran; A Mother’s Tale by Phillip Lopate; Huck Out West by Robert Coover; Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin; The Midnight Cool by Lydia Peelle; The Antiques by Kris D'Agostino; Lotus by Lijia Zhang; and Collected Stories by E.L. Doctorow. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest book preview.
Marketing Creativity
Tim Parks writes at NYRB about the constraints that the marketplace puts on writers' creativity. For more on publishing and the marketplace, check out our column on The Future of the Book.
The Handmaid’s Tale on TV
The Handmaid’s Tale is making its series debut on Hulu with Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) starring as Offred. Get ready for Gilead.
Read these hard and fast
A publisher in Buenos Aires is trying to give debut authors a leg up by... printing their books with disappearing ink?
●
●
Lego My Struggle
"Each one of those books is, like, several hundred pages long. So, that’s a lot of romantic anxiety and adolescent/young-adult/middle-aged angst to distill into pictures, but as far as I can tell, it’s all there: salted fish, shower-sex, alcohol-induced existential despair, the whole shebang! No reading required." The Melville House blog, MobyLives, revisits the work of an anonymous artist who reenacted all of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series using LEGOs. See also: our review of Knausgaard's epic.
●
●
A Brief History of Gay Liberation
“If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—‘Love Wins,’ ‘It Gets Better,’ and ‘You Can Play’—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s radical roots risk being expunged from memory.” On Jim Downs’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.