New this week: 300,000,000 by Blake Butler; Quick Kills by Lynn Lurie; A Different Bed Every Time by Jac Jemc; Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke; J by Howard Jacobson; Electric City by Elizabeth Rosner; The Goddess of Small Victories by Yannick Grannec; The Letters of Samuel Beckett; Volume 3; and Blue Horses by Mary Oliver. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Butler; Lurie; Jemc; Steinke; Jacobson; Rosner; Grannec; Beckett; Oliver
And in This Corner, Weighing in at 900 Pages…
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito alerts us to a forthcoming 900-page collection of short stories by Stephen Dixon. One hopes Fantagraphics has beefed up its copy-editing department since its last fictional behemoth, Alexander Theroux‘s Laura Warholic.
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Carpal Tunnel is the new Broken Back
Parts of Mac McLelland’s Mother Jones piece, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” read like what Daniel Orozco might write had he worked in an major shipping warehouse instead of a human resources department.
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Revel in the Disorderly
“The only way to get something new out of language, to try and get to what feels like the nearest simulacrum of truth, is to bend and shape that language, to break it’s form and strain against it, to coax it into a shape, to play with it. To revel in the disorderly.” Madeleine Watts writes about Eimear McBride‘s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (which our own Hannah Gersen recently reviewed), the limits of language and the necessity of a “Girl Canon” for The Believer‘s blog.
London Calling
London is the most popular literary city. Graphic designer Edgard Barbosa made an infographic that visualizes the number of English-language books written about 10 international cities from 1800 to 2000. The locales include Rome, New York City, London, Paris, Tokyo, Madrid, Beijing, Chicago, Cairo, and Mumbai.
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Phil Klay on “War Literature”
“I’ve been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don’t think there is anything.” The Daily Beast interviews Phil Klay about the National Book Award, Redeployment, and the concept of war literature.
Boycotting Indies?
We are now over a week into Amazon’s boycott of the indie press e-books distributed under the Independent Publishers Group. IPG is taking a stand against Amazon’s hardline negotiations during the retail giant’s annual contract review, and 5000 titles are no longer available through the Kindle store. Last week Jim Hanas, author of the digitally and independently published Why They Cried, spoke out against Amazon to champion other e-readers and e-book retailers. The renegotiations are taking place across the industry, though, as Melville House’s Dennis Johnson puts it, “major industry figures at the big houses in New York — facing similar cutthroat demands from Amazon for their own annual contracts — remain silent… This isn’t over yet.”
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It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus‘s The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.” When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.
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