ICYMI, J.J. Abrams (of Lost and Star Trek fame) will release a novel — conceived by Abrams and written by Doug Dorst — in October with the enigmatic title of S. Last month, he released the first half of a teaser trailer; this week, he released the second half.
The S Monster
Impeachment 101
“The purpose of this initiative, and this book, is to show everybody the actual definition of impeachment as set down by the Founding Fathers, and ask whether it applies to anything that is going on now.” Melville House books has discounted copies of A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment, which can be sent to a member of Congress of the buyer’s choice. In the meantime, maybe you’d like to get to know the other presidents?
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This Is Not a Novel
Lindsey Drager considers the novella and argues that it is neither a feminine form nor a smaller type of novel. As she puts it, “while other fiction aims outward, the novella curls in, coiling around itself until there’s no distinction between the story’s body and the story’s shell.” Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone’s essay on the art of the novella.
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Poetry From Hanoi Hilton
Bill Keller discusses John Borling’s Taps On The Walls, a collection of poems “tapped out in code, letter by letter, on the walls of a wretched cell in Hanoi during his 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.”
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Home Is Where the Story Begins
“Is the reason to have a home, as the narrator in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, asserts, ‘to keep certain people in and everyone else out’? Or does home, as the narrator in William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow suggests, work primarily as a scaffolding of known things — as a place to read, a place to stash the damp umbrella, a place to listen to the porch swing creak?” Beth Kephart on the literary significance of home.
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Deep, Hungry Gulps
“My idea of the ideal literary dinner party remains locking a book under my left wrist while conveying risotto to my mouth with my right at the kitchen table.” Stacy Schiff talks literary dinner parties and more in this week’s New York Times By the Book column. Schiff’s latest, The Witches: Salem, 1692, is out this week.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom Is a Public Intellectual
For Guernica, Roxane Gay interviews Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new essay collection, Thick.
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Natural Opposition
Recommended Reading: Michele Filgate’s interview with Leslie Jamison, who participated in Year in Reading this year.
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J.J. Abrams didn’t “write” anything. The other guy on the cover wrote the book. J.J. Abrams just supplied him with the basic outline of the story. Doug Dorst wrote “S.”
Thanks for catching that, M. I’ve edited the text to make this clear.