New this week: Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood; The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters; My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner; Wallflowers by Eliza Robertson; On Bittersweet Place by Ronna Wineberg; Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce; In the Red by Elena Mauli Shapiro; and Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Atwood; Waters; Turner; Robertson; Wineberg; Tierce; Shapiro; Darnielle
Another Launch from Flatmancrooked
Starting today, you can launch occasional Millions writer James Kaelan and his book, We’re Getting On, a “composite novel” (made up of two stories and two novellas, all thematically linked). And because this is part of his Zero-Emissions Book Project, Kaelan will promote his book by bike on a cross-country reading tour.
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Infinite Boston
Earlier this month William Beutler, a D.C. based writer, started a blog about the landmarks in Boston that inspired the landscape of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Beutler does a great job chronicling the real-life history of different buildings and explaining how DFW altered them to fit into his novel.
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Indie Road Trip
Something to do with those last remaining days of vacation: go on a national indie bookstore tour, as designed by Chin Music Press.
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Jay-Z and Michiko K.: Kindred Spirits
Michiko Kakutani‘s generous and oddly moving review of Jay-Z‘s Decoded – in which she seems to find a kindred spirit – almost makes me want to take back all the mean things I’ve said about her. I still don’t trust her judgment, but the review’s worth reading just for the mental image of her in big headphones, nodding along to “Streets Is Watching.” Go ‘head, shorty.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sorokin, Perec, O’Nan
Out this week is Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. Coinciding with that release, NYRB Classics is putting out Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is now on shelves, as is Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone, in which he revisits the Maxwell family from his 2002 book Wish You Were Here.
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Proust’s Lost Time
Between June 2009 and December 2010, Michael Norris explored Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in a series illustrated with original artwork by David Richardson. Litkicks has posted the entire stunning sequence on its site.