Dave Eggers has a new novel out this week, while Neil Gaiman has an illustrated version of a previously published story on shelves. Also out: I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy; The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay; and The Last Magazine by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.
Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Gaiman; Murphy, Upadhyay; Hastings
Well-informed ghosts
Kurt Anderson on the difference between writing a novel in first and third person voice: “Most third-person narrators are less like omniscient gods than exceedingly snoopy, well-informed ghosts. “
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Jim Crace’s Last Novel
Author Jim Crace reflects on his final book in Abu Dhabi’s The National: “The thing is, I’ve written an appalling amount of books. … The writing life doesn’t last forever. I am fit and well, and there are plenty of other things to do that I’m excited about, which are incompatible with spending most of my life shut up in a room. So that’s what I’m going to do, write a final book, and that will be it.”
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Wells Tower has a novel on the way
In a recent interview with Bookforum, Wells Tower dropped an enticing little detail about his latest project: a novel. Playing coy with the interviewer, Tower admitted only that “it will concern a family and it will contain a good number of pages.” No release date has been set at this time.
Fiction by Allegra Goodman
Recommended reading: elderly sisters contend with the youngest dying, in a quietly wry new story by Allegra Goodman at the New Yorker. “She pretended to sleep, and then she really did drop off. When she woke, her sisters were hovering over her. Some of us have overstayed our welcome, Jeanne thought. And then, with sudden shock, No: I’m the one. That would be me.”
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The Feel of Municipal Politics
Recommended Reading: Parul Sehgal on Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. (You could also check out Eric Lundgren’s counterpoint.)
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It’s just not the same, is it?
Don’t like the idea of reading e-books to your kids? Turns out you’re not alone — a new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor says (pdf) that seventy percent of parents who own iPads prefer to use print books when reading to their children. If you read these articles, you might have seen this coming.
An Interview with Rilke
How would Rilke do in a job interview? Liz Blood took her best guess.
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