We recently published our review of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Now comes news that yet another Murkami book will be hitting shores before the year is out. The Strange Library, already available for pre-order, is 96 pages long, will ship in December, and will include “full-color art throughout in a lavish volume designed by Chip Kidd.”
New Murakami: The Strange Library
Biblioracle
John Warner is the author of Funny Man and the occasional Millions article. He is also... The Biblioracle! and he wants you to be one, too.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Baker; Sauma; Shawn; Moore; Moore
Out this week: Our Little Racket by Anjelica Baker; Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma; Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn; The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues by Edward Kelsey Moore; and New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Choose Life
“The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.” Year in Reading alumna Sarah Manguso on envy and the purpose of writing. Pair with Jaime Green’s Millions review of Manguso’s Ongoingness.
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Media Studies
How to make magazine apps that aren't completely terrible.
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Football Book Club: Lawrence Wright’s ‘Going Clear’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and posting essays about Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn -- its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Going Clear was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and has been turned into a documentary by HBO.
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Multi-Talented Nick Cave
You have to be a little in awe of the multi-disciplinary artist. Musician Nick Cave, who made his screenwriting debut with The Proposition, talks to the New Yorkerabout his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as the multi-media audio book version.
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A Fan’s Lament
“We tether ourselves to others as a path not taken, a dream unfulfilled. A lesson unlearned, a responsibility unmet. We mourn idols as ourselves because even that unachieved road must end.” Paul Taunton has written a heartfelt Hazlitt essay on Frederick Exley, Frank Gifford, and passionate idolatry. Exley’s cult favorite A Fan’s Notes, published in 1988, is a fictional memoir that centers on a quasi-obsession with Gifford, who passed away earlier this week at the age of eighty-four.
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