New this week: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton; The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith; Lisette’s List by Susan Vreeland; Fives and Twenty Fives by Michael Pitre; Mr. Tall by Tony Earley; and Love, of a Kind by Felix Dennis. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Burton; Smith; Vreeland; Pitre; Earley; Dennis
Tuesday New Release Day: Perotta, Johnson, Pelecanos, Torres, Fonts, Murray
New this week: The Leftovers by Tom Perotta, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, The Cut by George Pelecanos, Justin Torres’s debut We the Animals, and Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. And new in paperback is Millions Hall of Famer Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.
●
●
Do I Know You?
No one is unique; we all share names, but what if you met everyone who had the same name as you? At The Morning News, Jennifer Berman reached out to her doppelgängers. “I’ve thought about writing her. But what would I say? I’m Jennifer Berman, too?”
Tuesday New Release Day: Prose; McCracken; Binchy; Rahman; Glancy; Bender; Marias
Francine Prose has a new novel out this week, while Elizabeth McCracken has a new story collection on shelves. Also out: Chestnut Street by the late Maeve Binchy; In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman; Terms and Conditions by Robert Glancy; The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan; and new paperback editions of The Color Master by Aimee Bender and The Infatuations by Javier Marias.
●
●
With One Eye Squinted
“I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” The New Yorker reports on “Flannery O’Connor‘s Manhattan Memorial” and pitch-perfect quotation.
Critiques for Charity
We’ve seen a lot of interesting literary fundraisers (and are still a bit in awe of Catstarter) but a recent campaign goes beyond the usual Kickstarter: a group of well-known American writers, from Heather McHugh to Philip Levine to Rebecca Makkai, will be selling manuscript critiques later this month to benefit Caregifted.org.
●
●
You Faking Fakers
This quick-and-dirty Times article about a crackdown on fake reviews includes one of the best sentences to appear in the Gray Lady of late: “Faking reviews often begins with faked reviews of the company faking the reviews.”
●
●
Exotic and Rarely Worn
“My mind flashed that disembodied jaw at me in a jaw’s version of full color; a dirty white that bone and snow agree on.” This piece of original short fiction from Kashana Cauley at The Daily Beast will make you never want to set foot in a Hermés store–or even just shop on Black Friday.
●
●
Risk-Taker, Miracle-Maker
“Maybe the optimists are right; maybe poetry does help you live your life. And maybe they are more right than they know, and it rounds you out for death.” Andrew O’Hagan writes for The Guardian about falling in love with poetry and coming to see the poet as “a risk-taker, a miracle-maker, a moral panjandrum and a convict of the senses.”
●
●