Out this week: Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn; Another Great Day at Sea by Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer; Funny Once by Antonya Nelson; Black Lake by Johanna Lane; Closed Doors by Lisa O’Donnell; Decompression by the German writer Juli Zeh; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, published now for the first time. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn; Dyer; Nelson; Lane; O’Donnell; Zeh; Tolkien
No Bill the Butcher?
If Martin Scorsese develops a TV series based on Gangs of New York but it doesn’t feature Daniel Day-Lewis or Leonardo DiCaprio, will anybody watch it?
Picador Playlists
The gulf between Picador and every other publishing house continues to yawn in one major aspect: literary playlists. To honor the release of Dylan Jones’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music, Justin Hargett put together a list of his “Favorite Covered Songs!” (Previously: the “Marriage Playlist” for Jeffrey Eugenides)
A TumBelivr event in San Fran!
Tumblr and the Believer are throwing a party at San Fransisco’s Make-Out Room! Sheila Heti will be there, and so will Issac Fitzgerald, and Melissa Graeber. If you’d like to cover this event for #LitBeat, well, just get in touch!
Ask Jeeves
Didn’t like how the Utterly Uncle Fred stories ended? Now is your chance to rewrite them and other P.G. Wodehouse favorites. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg presents “Choose Your Own P.G. Wodehouse Adventure.”
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O Canada
We celebrated Canada Day a bit early here yesterday with the news that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature and our review of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. So what is Canadian literature exactly? Atwood offered her definition for The Daily Beast: “It’s too multiple [to give a concise definition], but let us say that the point of view (if the writer is not pretending to be American, which they often are) is never that of someone who feels that their country is an imperial power. Because, in fact, Canada is not an imperial power.” You can also see The Handmaid’s Tale at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet next week.
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The Worst Thing About Owning a Bookstore
The worst thing about owning your own bookstore? According to Garrison Keillor, it’s that “you do not get a 10 percent discount when you buy books. I don’t know why. It was explained to me once, and I didn’t understand. I mean, I’m the owner, right? But no, that’s not how it’s done.”
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It’s Not TV, It’s Jonathan Franzen.
To celebrate the official HBO adaptation of Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections, The New Yorker has compiled a list of “Franzen Facts.”
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The memories of very small readers
Although children’s earliest memories often don’t stay with them, as this new article on Aeon describes, babies form emotional connections and intellectual attitudes that last the rest of their lives. So read to your newborn, according to Jason Boog (Born Reading), even if she doesn’t yet know the words.
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