Out this week: The Complete Journalism of James Agee; Straight Razor by Randall Mann; The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley; The Virgil Encyclopedia; and a new e-book edition of Incarnadine, the poetry collection by Mary Szybist that won this year’s National Book Award.
Tuesday New Release Day: Agee; Mann; Cowley; Virgil; Szybist
Lake(rs) Wo(e)begone
It’s not the first of April and this is not a joke, NBA all-star and future hall of famer Kobe Bryant announced his retirement yesterday–in verse. Oh Kobe, how will we miss thee? Let me count the ways.
Times: New Film and Book Claim Five New J.D. Salinger Books to Be Published Starting in 2015
The Times is reporting that a new film and companion book (Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno) “include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.” One of the books is said to include a retooled version of Salinger’s unpublished (but available at the Princeton library) story “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.” Kristopher Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) wrote about the story for us in 2011. Bonus Link: Garth Risk Hallberg on Salinger’s legacy.
Gah!
Despite your lifelong aversion to robots and crash-test dummies, the Uncanny Valley might not actually be real. At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the evidence that unsettling dolls are just that, unsettling.
●
●
Stanford Online Courses
Stanford’s next round of free online courses includes Cryptography, Human-Computer Interaction, and Game Theory.
●
●
Following Oscar
“To translate the power of Tish and Fonny’s love to the screen in Baldwin’s image is a dream I’ve long held dear. Working alongside the Baldwin Estate, I’m excited to finally make that dream come true.” Oscar-winning Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting James Baldwin‘s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk for the screen, says The Hollywood Reporter. (He’s also bringing Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to visual life as well.)
●
●
Love and Memory
Recommended Reading: This fantastic essay by Lea Page at The Rumpus on memory, family, and a whole lot more than that: “There could be no argument, no defense. It was, in a literal sense, true. I had said that.Sure, she had left out a significant portion of the truth, but in doing so, she had revealed another. That was the one memory my mother cleaved to. That was the song she chose to sing of me. I was still losing at memory.”
●
●