New this week: A Life in Men by Gina Frangello; Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux; An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine; The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol; Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor; and The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frangello; Theroux; Alameddine; Antopol; Minor; Schaffert
Blake Butler on Submitting Writing
HTMLGiant‘s editor Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year, has compiled a list of things he’s learned from submitting his writing.
Planning for the End
“If Earth overheats and crops and fuel become scarce, guess what? I know good bartering supplies include tampons, mercury fillings, eyeglasses. One particularly anxious day I read instructions on how to cook on my woodstove—so in the early days of environmental apocalypse and culture collapse, my family will enjoy bygone potatoes roasted over hot coals and underdone loaves of bread.” Year in Reading alumna Megan Mayhew Bergman prepares herself for the apocalypse.
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Our correspondent reports from AWP
Presenting another installment of #LitBeat: The US and UK Poets Laureate at AWP 2012.
Wordpocalypse
In the beginning, God died, and it was bad. Then the pun died too, and despair came over the people.
How and How Not to View Africa
Mama Hope, a group that works with local African organizations “to connect them with the resources required to transform their own communities,” has released a great promo featuring four young men who are tired of Hollywood’s African stereotypes. Their complaints are reminiscent of those enumerated in Binyavanga Wainaina’s classic essay “How to Write about Africa,” and also in Laura Seay’s great article from last week, “How Not to Write About Africa.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Morrison; Schultz; Roe; Wellington; Cohen; Parrett; Miller; Gibbon
New this week: God Help the Child by Toni Morrison; The Blondes by Emily Schultz; The Miracle Girl by Andrew Roe; Positive by David Wellington; This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen; When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett; Seven Devils by M.G. Miller; and Paris Red by Maureen Gibbon. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Finnegans What, Now?
I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex “fractal” sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to “ideal” mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.