Recommended Reading: Roger Angell describes life in the nineties. His nineties.
“Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you.”
Harry Potter and the Teflon Cloak
We’ve been jealous of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak since The Sorcerer’s Stone. Now scientists can make an invisibility cloak in 15 minutes with Teflon. We’ll never get our Hogwarts acceptance letter, but this is pretty close.
Poet Laureate (Again)
“Her exchanges with Americans in small towns and rural communities are inspiring an appreciation of poetry and history – and remind us that poetry has value for all of our lives.” The Library of Congress appointed Tracy K. Smith to a second term as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2018-2019. For her second term, Smith edited an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which will be published by Graywolf Press in association with the Library of Congress. Pair with: our review of Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light.
A Writer’s Day
The Green Road author Anne Enright shares her writing day, over at The Guardian. “22:00 Bedtime stuff with offspring. 23:00 Dishes. Netflix. Two bottles of IPA. Chill.” Pair with Diane Prokop’s Millions interview with the author.
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‘Best American’ on the Cheap
Pretty good deal on Amazon today: All the e-book versions of the “Best American” books are $1.99.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Banville, Erdrich, Petterson, Meek, Helprin, Lehane, Cisneros, Sloan, Josefson, Bertino, Ware, Paris Review, BASS, Amis
October kicks off with a mega-dose of new fiction: Ancient Light by John Banville, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, It’s Fine By Me by Per Petterson, The Heart Broke In by James Meek, In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin, Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, and Have You Seen Marie? by Sandra Cisneros. And that doesn’t even include debuts Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, That’s Not a Feeling by Dan Josefson, and Safe As Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino. And there’s more: graphic novel master Chris Ware’s Building Stories, The Paris Review’s collection Object Lessons (we interviewed one of the Steins behind the book) and this year’s Best American Short Stories collection. Finally, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is out in a new NYRB Classics edition with an introduction by Keith Gessen.