Barrelhouse recently revamped their website, but that’s not even the most exciting news out of the D.C.-based literary outfit this week. No, sir. The most exciting news is that the magazine’s newest online issue is “focused on the theme of 1980s professional wrestling.” The list of contributors includes Aaron Burch, Matthew Duffus, and Jeannine Mjoseth.
Barrelhouse’s Wrestling Issue
The Forgotten Forty
In a sea of Best Book lists, LitHub spoke to 40 booksellers about the most overlooked titles of 2017. On the list? Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which was featured in Emily St. John Mandel‘s Year in Reading.
Better Book Reviews
Darryl Campbell has had enough of the clichés abundant in book reviews so he’s devised some alternatives. “If fine artists aren’t your thing,” Campbell writes, “then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: ‘Taft-like excess,’ ‘Cleveland-esque genre-bending’ or ‘Clintonian eroticism’.”
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“A Imperfect Dad”
“As much as I claimed that I read for my own edification, it was a lie. The books I was most drawn to were those that were loved by someone in my life. Reading them, I thought, would teach me all I needed to know about them—nice and safe, from a distance. Reading them with one hand, it was easy to have the other keep them at arm’s length.” Romy Sugden writes for The Oyster Review about trying to connect with her estranged father by reading John le Carré‘s A Perfect Spy.
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Wifely Pursuits
Tolstoy has a new book out. No, not that Tolstoy — Sofiya Tolstoy, wife of Leo Nikolayevich. Her long-lost novella, which languished for years in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, has finally been published, as part of an expanded edition of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata. At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum praises her story, calling it “graceful, emotionally intuitive and heartbreaking.” Related: 8 experts on whether Leo Tolstoy is better than Dostoevsky.
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