Big news: It looks like Haruki Murakami’s much-anticipated new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage finally has a U.S. publication date: August 12, 2014.
New Murakami Coming in August
Find the Long Word
Middlesex author and Pulitzer Prize winner (and Year in Reading alum) Jeffrey Eugenides has a new story out in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. Titled “Find the Bad Guy,” it may well be the first New Yorker story to show a character playing Words with Friends. Sample quote: “She had her arms around me, and we were rocking, real soft-like, the way Meg did after we gave her that kitten, before it died, I mean, when it was just a warm and cuddly thing instead of like it had hoof and mouth, and went south on us.”
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Legendary Lovers
Recommended Reading: Becca Rothfeld on courtship and gender roles in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature written at the turn of the eleventh century.
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Scaring Men
Here are a couple Halloween-related essays from the good people at The Literary Hub: This fascinating literary history of witches by Jess Bergman, and this piece by Tobias Carroll on non-fiction writers crossing the supernatural line between fantasy and reality.
Dear Diary
This week in Bookends: in which Thomas Mallon and Pankaj Mishra muse on which writer’s journals are really worth reading. Here’s a bonus Millions piece on Bookends for all those New York Times devotees.
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Masthead Revisited
“This is a story about a woman who was erased from her job as the editor of the most famous literary magazine in America.” For Longreads, A.N. Devers writes about Brigid Hughes, the second editor of The Paris Review, who has been all but scrubbed from the magazine’s history. See also: Dever’s 2011 Year in Reading entry.
Rooster Starter Kit
The Morning News Tournament of Books is around the corner (less than two weeks away, in fact) and readers can now download the bracket (pdf), print it out, and start scribbling in their picks. Along with the bracket, Andrew Seal offers up an array of intriguing statistics from past tournaments. So, now that you can make an educated guess, Who do you think is going to win this year?
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