Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
Joyless
Tuesday New Release Day: Hill; Donohoe; Bausch; Hall & Hobbs
Out this week: The Nix by Nathan Hill; Ashes of Fiery Weather by Kathleen Donohoe; The Legend of Jesse Smoke by Robert Bausch; and Sex and Death, a new story anthology including pieces by Kevin Barry, Wells Tower and Yiyun Li. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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Trethewey Named Poet Laureate
You should get to know Natasha Trethewey, our newly minted Poet Laureate, and here are a few good places to start: The Missouri Review’s Summer 2010 interview with the poet, and Virginia Quarterly Review’s round-up of some of her poems.
The Right to Complain
It’s a truth as old as academia: graduate students moan about the lengths of their dissertations. But which grad students are most entitled to complain? Herewith, a chart that compares dissertation lengths by major.
Tuesday New Release Day
Lots of diet books among the new releases these days (in preparation for the post-holiday food guilt one assumes), but readers will also find a vibrant new “biography-in-collage” out this week, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss.
That Summer
Yes, “books to read this summer” lists are proliferating on the internet to a staggering degree — our own “Summer Reading List For Wretched Assholes” notwithstanding. However, few lists address the importance of a single season quite like this one by Carrie Mullins at Electric Literature, which takes a look at 11 novels that take place during one summer.
Small Fish
Over at The Guardian, Kevin Duffy argues that small presses do the heavy lifting in the publishing world. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.