Francine Prose has a new novel out this week, while Elizabeth McCracken has a new story collection on shelves. Also out: Chestnut Street by the late Maeve Binchy; In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman; Terms and Conditions by Robert Glancy; The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan; and new paperback editions of The Color Master by Aimee Bender and The Infatuations by Javier Marias.
Tuesday New Release Day: Prose; McCracken; Binchy; Rahman; Glancy; Bender; Marias
2017 Newbery and Caldecott Winners
Kelly Barnhill, author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is the winner of this year’s Newbery Medal for “most outstanding contribution to children’s literature,” and Javaka Steptoe, author of Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, won this year’s Caldecott Medal.
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STEM for Dogs
Even dogs are learning STEM now. Check out this rigorous program from Rollover Academy at McSweeney’s.
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A Separatist Syllabus
How do readers recover from an abominable weekend but with a reading list, in this case one suggested on Twitter by Jay Varner, a writer and instructor based in Charlottesville. Varner links out to 12 articles about “why so many continue to believe an unequivocally false historical narrative surrounding the Confederacy,” including pieces by New Orleans’ mayor Mitch Landrieu, Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose Between the World and Me made our roundup from last year of the best political fiction (yes, we do realize it’s decidedly not fiction).
The Drama of Rejection
We’ve all been rejected; after all, we’re writers. Yet sometimes it’s nice to know someone has it worse than you. With that in mind, New Hampshire Public Radio presents dramatic readings of famous rejection letters. Pair with: Our ask a writing teacher on rejection from various literary journals.
Feminist Bookstores Resisting Trump and Getting Stronger Sales
“The feminist bookstores in the nation’s largest cities are experiencing the most significant upticks in sales, as well as in foot traffic.” We love bookstores here at the Millions, especially feminist ones. So we were ecstatic to see this piece in Publisher’s Weekly about the bonanza of feminist bookstores seeing an increase in sales and attention. While there are not many of these bookstores left, the ones that are still alive attribute their increased popularity to the ‘Trump bump.’ Read the story here and be sure to visit all the bookstores mentioned the next time you’re in town.
New Joyce Carol Oates Story
Recommended Reading: “Sex with Camel” by Joyce Carol Oates. As she tweeted, “Never thought, when I was a child in wilds of upstate NY, that I would grow up to write a story with such a title.”
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Plotting Genres
This week in book-related infographics: “A Plotting of Fiction Genres” from Electric Lit.
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Anxiety or Discipline?
Recommended Viewing: This installment of The Paris Review’s “My First Time” series, in which poet Ben Lerner remembers “working under the sign of crisis” and attempting to find a publisher for his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. A couple of Lerner-related pieces from The Millions: a review of his newest novel, 10:04, and a Year in Reading from back in 2014.
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