Out this week: Friendship by Emily Gould; God Is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster; How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer; The Actress by Amy Sohn; Last Night at the Blue Angel by Rebecca Rotert; The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob; Three Light-Years by Andrea Canobbio; The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace; The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil; and a previously unpublished short story by Samuel Beckett.
Tuesday New Release Day: Gould; Foster; Netzer; Sohn; Rotert; Jacob; Canobbio; Wallace; Weil; Beckett
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
Tuesday New Release Day
On shelves this week are Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, and a provocative new book by Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
Poets Talk Back
Over at The Margins, Franny Choi, Ali Eteraz, and others respond to Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” As they put it, “Trillin is part of the ‘we’ in his poem but it’s clear that Chinese and Chinese American people are not. Instead, invoking Yellow Peril fears, Trillin speaks of the threat food from ‘more provinces’ while ignoring that those provinces are home to people, too.”
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Help Put Books in the Hands of NYC Kids
ReadThis and The Center for Fiction are throwing a day-long event featuring the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Rick Moody, Kurt Andersen, Sam Lipsyte, and Jamaica Kincaid. It’s taking place at 17 East 47th Street in Manhattan on Saturday April 10th. “The price of admission? Your donation of two or more new or gently used board books through grade 12.”
“It really is a different life”
Donna Tartt has a new novel out, and with it come new interviews. At Salon, Laura Miller sits down with the author behind The Secret History.
Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cantor; Wilson; Spivack; Chirbes; Sparks; Williams
Out this week: Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor; Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson; Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack; On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes; The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks; and Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
The Dark Side of Google
In the near future, Google may use your surrounding sights and sounds to help advertisers target you. Over at Gizmodo, Mat Honan eloquently argues against just this type of thing, and states that “the case against Google is for the first time starting to outweigh the case for it.”