I’ve written before about By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which authors write short pieces about their favorite passages in literature. This week, our own Edan Lepucki — whose new novel you may have heard about thanks to Stephen Colbert — writes about the metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (FYI, Margaret Atwood wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
Body Language
The People Hath Spoken
Is it possible to figure out Shakespeare's politics from his plays? At the very least, there's a lot we can learn.
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“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
"In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time." Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
Times: New Film and Book Claim Five New J.D. Salinger Books to Be Published Starting in 2015
The Times is reporting that a new film and companion book (Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno) "include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015." One of the books is said to include a retooled version of Salinger's unpublished (but available at the Princeton library) story "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans." Kristopher Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) wrote about the story for us in 2011. Bonus Link: Garth Risk Hallberg on Salinger's legacy.
That Was Fast
McCain speechwriter Mark Salter has been outed as the "Anonymous" behind the political novel O just two days after the book hit shelves.
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Traveling with Orhan Pamuk
Want to see the real Istanbul? Take a tour with the ultimate guide, Orhan Pamuk. The author showed The New York Times's Joshua Hammer around the city. Pair with: Our review of The Museum of Innocence and our essay on his politics.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Coover; Donoghue; Huneven; Glass; Coupland; Osborne; Waldman; Jamison
New this week: The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover; Frog Music by Emma Donoghue; Off Course by Michelle Huneven; And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass; Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland; The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne; Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman; and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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