Out this week: Thirty Girls by Susan Minot; The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol; The Bear by Claire Cameron; The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton; The Quiet Streets of Winslow by Judy Troy; a new translation of August by Christa Wolf; The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter; and The Journey of a Caribbean Writer by Maryse Condé. For more on these and other new releases, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Minot; Antopol; Cameron; de Botton; Troy; Wolf; Cotter; Conde
Biblio-klepto-mania
“Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.” Lauren Young writes in Atlas Obscura about the phenomenon of bibliomania, “a dark pseudo-psychological illness” that afflicted upper-class victims in Europe and England during the 1800s. And for a first-hand account of more contemporary book theft, read John Brandon on his high school pastime: “The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in.”
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The Darker Side of Jack London
“The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs.” Johann Hari reviews James L. Haley’s new biography Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, at Slate.
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Vanishing Point’s Editorial Fellowship
Vanishing Point, which I’ve praised in the past, is offering an editorial fellowship in digital documentary publishing, and it’s open to people who live near Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, as well as to those who live far away.
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Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen in Conversation
The New York Times unearthed footage from a 1996 interview with Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen. The pair discuss a trip they took to New Guinea in the 60s, which “resulted in Gardner’s film Dead Birds and Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall.”
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“You’re allowed to laugh.”
A new installment of #LitBeat, in which Steve Almond gives a hilarious and exuberant reading in Moscow, Idaho.
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The real Daisy Buchanan
“The poor boy losing the rich girl is a common theme in Fitzgerald’s work, and the original model was surely his relationship with Ginerva King.” AKA the real Daisy Buchanan, who, might I note, looks nothing at all like Carey Mulligan.
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