Out this week: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant; Cementville by Paulette Livers; Damage Control by Amber Dermont; Blood Will Out by Up in the Air author Walter Kirn; Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler; and The Haunted Life, a new collection of early writing by Jack Kerouac.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hustvedt; Poissant; Livers; Dermont; Kirn; Butler; Kerouac
“Keep Arguing”
There are plenty of good reasons to read classic literature, but Mary Beard reminds us that there’s a different kind of classic that’s worth revisiting and questioning. “You do the ancient world much greater service if you keep arguing with them.”
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Uncommon Language
Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”
Everything That Rises Must Be Filmed
Recommended Listening: this episode of the Ryder + Flye podcast in which Jason Diamond and Margaret Eby discuss Southern Catholicism, 70s cinema, and why it’s so darn hard to make Flannery O’Connor’s stories work on the screen.
Borders Officially Closes
The sale of Borders was officially approved yesterday. To make sense of the entire fiasco, Melville House’s Dennis Johnson has a compelling write-up. For most book lovers, their final sale is bittersweet.
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For the Birds
It’s not easy being a seagull. Over at the London Review of Books, Mary Wellesley takes a sympathetic look at how the much-maligned bird has been treated throughout the history of literature. Afterwards, let this essay from The Millions by Kristen Scharold on the joys of birdwatching lift your spirits a bit.
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Which Book Can Save Your Life?
Freedom, The Imperfectionists, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were some of the biggest books of the year, both literally and among our readers. But which one of them could stop a bullet for you? Electric Lit posts a video of the necessary research.
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