Out this week: The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson; Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford; Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet; Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter; Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismail Kadare; A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin; Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash; and Shark by Will Self. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Johnson; Ford; Millet; Hunter; Kadare; Jin; Rash; Self
Chicken or Hen?
“Katrina Dodson has spent more time thinking about the word ‘chicken’ than you have spent thinking about anything.” The Stranger sits down with Katrina Dodson, translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories. Pair with Dodson’s Year in Reading.
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Bibliotherapy for Fiction Lovers
Ceridwen Dovey asks, can reading make you happier?
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“It was a nasty autumn morning…”
A thoughtful piece of fiction to mark the November 10 anniversary of Atatürk‘s death.
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Welcome to the Book Tour
Our own Emily St. John Mandel gives a glimpse of her life on the road. “I’d been on tour for so long that I had to take a picture of my hotel room door every time I checked into a new place, because otherwise I’d forget my room number,” she writes. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on the place where writers work.
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Novels on Novelists
What’s the deal with all of the novels about famous writers? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, according to Heller McAlpin at The Literary Hub, “there’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when you know what the future holds for them—which in the case of most of these authors is posthumous literary acclaim beyond their wildest dreams.”
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“The Fall Guy”
Just when you thought we’d covered every aspect of the story of self-publishing, something like this happens. A Canadian serial killer convicted of killing six women and charged in the deaths of another twenty has self-published a memoir on Amazon in which he maintains his innocence. The papers were allegedly smuggled out of the prison by another inmate and published by a self-publishing service under a pseudonym. Amazon has since discontinued sales of the book.
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Agent Scully, Author
“There is so much low self-esteem in girls, and so much self-hate that I keep reading about. My first idea for a book was something that would help to lift girls out of that place of negativity.” Actor Gillian Anderson and journalist Jennifer Nadel are writing a 300-plus page guide entitled We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, slated for release in March 2017.