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
Big Little Lies
“Literature can use secrecy as a device to ensnare readers, to pull the wool over their eyes or to reveal to them things that the characters can’t see. Whether large – businessman by day, serial killer by night; or small – where a character silently yearns for an ex-lover.” Eli Goldstone compiles a list for The Guardian of 10 novels whose characters are concealing big secrets, including a few lesser-knowns like Shirley Jackson‘s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani.
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Scared of the Dead
“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.” Chinese censors have cracked down on social media sites following the death and hushed burial-at-sea of writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo last week, reports The New York Times.
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“The equal of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev”
Recommended Reading: Eileen Battersby on a new translation of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov.
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New Michael Lewis Book On the Way
Michael Lewis’s next book, which is due to hit shelves in March, will be concerned with “the financial world.” And that’s really all we know about it at this point.
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Transcending Annihilation with Madeleine L’Engle
Abigail Santamaria examines how the 1918 flu pandemic and threat of nuclear war influenced Madeleine L’Engle’s writing.
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An Illusion To Think So
“We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies.” This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.
DFW’s Nonfiction
Leveling the kind of accusation that perhaps only such an esteemed writer can, Jonathan Franzen intimates that David Foster Wallace‘s nonfiction (such as “Shipping Out“) wasn’t exactly honest.
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