“With Your Wings,” a lost Steinbeck story from the 1940’s, has just been published for the first time by literary magazine The Strand.
Lost Steinbeck
Read Your McClanahan
Recommended Reading: an excerpt from Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan. We recently featured an article by Eric Obenauf – the book’s publisher – on the benefits of moving away from New York City.
Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include the much-hyped The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I. Also out in nonfiction is President Obama’s picture book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit), as reviewed by the New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and, for hip-hop fans, Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded.
Philosophy’s Monster
Frankenstein was originally a philosophical novel, Michael Saler reveals in his review of The Annotated Frankenstein. Mary Shelley used her monster to comment on the terrors of the French Revolution, patriarchy, social justice, and slavery, he writes.
“Go Read Alice”
The diary novel may be “an under-attended” genre, but Johannah King-Slutzky is trying to remedy that. In an essay for The Hairpin she traces the diary novel’s history from the Victorian era to Go Ask Alice while examining the genre’s balance of “melodrama and awkward moralizing” with the potential for subversion.
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.
Neil Gaiman Nachos
Neil Gaiman’s writing gets compared to “a great bowl of nachos” in Nikki Steele’s food-focused review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Pair with: our own Nick Moran on how his favorite books influence his appetite.