Out this week: a new novel, Dissident Gardens, by Year in Reading alum Jonathan Lethem; Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush; His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon; Goat Mountain by Year in Reading alum David Vann; Someone by Alice McDermott; and Enon by Paul Harding, which Joseph M. Schuster wrote about for The Millions yesterday.
Tuesday New Release Day: Lethem, Rush, Dixon, Vann, McDermott, Harding
Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
Tuesday New Release Day: DeLillo; Millet; Russo; Morgan; Haslett; Erens
New this week: Zero K by Don DeLillo; Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet; Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo; The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan; Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett; and Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens (who we interviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
Books on the Radio
In case you missed it the first time, Tulsa’s KWGS the week re-aired an interview with my co-editor Jeff Martin on our book that came out earlier this year, The Late American Novel.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Gilbert, Forna, Drabble, Segal, MacFarlane, Winterson, de la Pava, Franzen
New releases this week include The Signature of All Things by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, which you can learn more about in Steve Almond’s review for the Times. Also out: The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna; The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble; Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal; The Night Guest by Fiona MacFarlane; The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson; Personae by Hall of Famer Sergio de la Pava; and The Karl Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen.
●
●
Da Firenze
At Ploughshares, take a journey through Florence with Emily Smith (and Dante).
The Dangerous Women of Westeros
George R. R. Martin’s publisher shared an excerpt from the author’s story, “The Princess and The Queen, or, The Blacks and The Greens.” The piece serves as a “Westerosi history lesson on the Targaryen Civil War,” and covers “the Causes, Origins, Battles, and Betrayals of that Most Tragic Bloodletting Known as the Dance of the Dragons.” It will be bundled along with 20 other stories in the forthcoming Dangerous Women collection. The question remains, however: what kind of recipes does it feature?
●
●
Why Reading
“Unlike, say, skimming a page of headlines, reading a book (of any genre) forces your brain to think critically and make connections from one chapter to another, and to the outside world. When you make connections, so does your brain, literally forging new pathways between regions in all four lobes and both hemispheres. Over time, these neural networks can promote quicker thinking and may provide a greater defense against the worst effects of cognitive decay.” Readers Digest compiles the latest research about why you should read (via Book Riot).
●
●