Girls creator Lena Dunham’s first book is on shelves, as is the new short story collection by Man Booker laureate and recent Millions interviewee Hilary Mantel. Also out: On Immunity by Eula Biss; A Sudden Light by Garth Stein; Consumed by the filmmaker David Cronenberg; The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan; and The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. For more on these and other titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Dunham; Mantel; Biss; Stein; Cronenberg; Zupan; Amis
Illness as Metaphor
Melissa Broder shares her thoughts on open marriage and illness in an excerpt from her So Sad Today. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on writing through illness.
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PEN Literary Award Longlists Released
The final PEN Literary Award Longlists are posted today! Check out all of the lists here. Longlisters include Angela Flournoy (whom we interviewed, and who has written a Year in Reading for us), Marilynne Robinson (who is known for her singular vision), Renata Adler (about whom we have made six possibly true observations), and David L. Ulin (whose Year in Reading is here).
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Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More Time
Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it's not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that "the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable."
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You Won’t Believe What Happens Next
“The New York Times said goodbye to roughly a hundred editorial staffers, with a similar number gone from the Wall Street Journal. Condé Nast might be shuttering Details and Self and will possibly unleash a bloodbath in the fall. Time Inc., Meredith Corporation, and Prometheus Global Media—owner of the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard—and other outlets have all recently cut costs.” Noah Davis on online journalism and the current state of affairs for writers, over at The Awl. Pair with Kate Angus's essay on making money as a poet.
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Book Preservation
Recommended Reading: On the process of bringing old books back to life.
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Miraculous
"I’ve always been interested in the internal shape-changes of the poem. In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning." An interview with Harvard's Helen Vendler about the structure of poetry, the benefits of studying science and mathematics, and the "miraculous" voices of Shakespeare and Keats.
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Book Collecting Bonanza
At Bookride, the top 20 sites for book collectors.
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