Out this week: The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones; A Stranger in My Own Country by Hans Fallada; Teresa, My Love by Julia Kristeva; an omnibus edition of John le Carré’s first three novels; Ticket to Childhood by Nguyen Nhat Anh; and a new volume of letters by Mark Twain. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Falcones; Fallada; Kristeva; le Carré; Anh; Twain
Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
●
●
Tuesday Means New Releases
Celebrate today’s arrival of John Irving’s new novel Last Night in Twisted River by seeing where it falls on Wikipedia’s John Irving recurring themes matrix. Also new today is Paul Auster’s Invisible and a new collection of Paris Review interviews (including, among others, Marilynne Robinson, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth). Speaking of Roth, his new novel The Humbling came out last week.
●
●
Money and Making Out Both
Even more Rossetti! Here is a hilarious reimagining of Rossetti’s “Jenny” by Mallory Ortberg over at The Toast. If it’s a belly laugh you’re looking for, then stick with Ortberg: try Dirtbag Jason and the Argonauts.
●
●
Kindred
The new novel by Colm Tóibín draws largely from the author’s memories of his father passing away when he was young. In a Guardian essay, the author writes about his discovery that literature can be a vessel for grief, with a nod to the writer and Dublin mainstay Mary Lavin. If you’d like to learn more about Tóibín’s fiction, you can read our pieces on his books.
Here Comes the Rooster
The Tournament of Books has returned, and this year’s judges include our own Kirstin Butler!
●
●
There’s Treasure Everywhere
In the mind of the ethical parent, one question overshadows all others: what’s the best way to get your kid to read Calvin and Hobbes? Unfortunately, there are no simple answers, only theories. (ICYMI: here’s a tribute to Calvin’s snow sculptures.)
Rough Trade
Considering his first novel was a chronicle of gang life in the Bronx, it makes sense that the new book by Richard Price is a tale of the NYPD. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates reads the novel, remarking that it “retains a residue of Price’s absorption with his rough urban settings and with the phenomenon of a particular sort of masculinity.” Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Price and his crime fiction contemporaries.
●
●