Wells Tower is having himself a great week, and it stands to reason that when he’s having a good week, we’re all having one as well. After all, we get to ponder the potential of the script Tower wrote for You Shall Know Our Velocity, an upcoming film based on Dave Eggers’s novel of the same name. We also get to read Tower’s Garden & Gun piece on “the nervous work of owning – and finally loving – a Chihuahua.” And as though that wasn’t enough already, we also get to savor Tower’s gripping feature story in the latest GQ, “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?”
A Big Week for Wells Tower
The Art of Hyping
Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding is ubiquitous. We tapped it in our Second Half of 2011 Preview. n+1 bundled it with year-long subscriptions. The Awl interviewed the author. The New Yorker's Book Club picked it as their September book. It was reviewed in The New York Times. Now Keith Gessen's expanded his Vanity Fair piece on the novel's development into a standalone e-book. In light of all this hype, McNally Jackson's Tumblr provides a poignant list of baseball puns for reviewers to start avoiding.
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(Not) A Restaurant Review
The Morning News is asking writers to visit restaurants and then write about the experience, so long as the piece they write adheres to two criteria: “1) it is a restaurant review” and “2) it is not a restaurant review.” First on deck: Roxane Gay, whose novel Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site.
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RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing passed away last night at the age of 94. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child and The Golden Notebook took home the Nobel in 2007 for "subjecting a divided civilisation to scrutiny," in the words of the prize committee.
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Back to School
The Guardian has a list of its five favorite on-campus novels, including Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, which we ran an excerpt of back when it came out, and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, whose connections to the academy we've also explored on the site.
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“Let the Games Begin,” as Bane Would Say
The Olympics Opening Ceremony this year sure was… something. Thankfully, folks more eloquent than I are here to parse its craziness for us: Jenny Diski and Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on what it was, plus Alex Shephard and the Full Stop bunch on what it should have been.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Dovlatov, Wolitzer, Moore, Sickels
2012 could be the year that we get to know Sergei Dovlatov, and our own Sonya Chung may have played a role. Her 2009 piece on the forgotten Russian humorist helped land one of his stories in PEN America. Soon we started seeing Dovlatov mentioned everywhere, and last year, Counterpoint published The Suitcase, and now The Zone will be released this week. Other new releases this week: An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer, Heft by Liz Moore, and The Evening Hour, a debut novel by Carter Sickels.
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