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
New Sebald Excerpt
Over at Page-Turner, you can check out an excerpt from W.G. Sebald’s A Place In the Country, which we previewed briefly in our Great 2014 Book Preview last month.
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Reel Art
“‘A good projectionist should be invisible,’ he says, his small rectangular glasses steadied on his forehead. ‘No one should be able to tell you’re in the booth changing the reels.’” A look at the hidden process of reel-to-reel cinema.
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Twain and Keller
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 in which the author has dinner with Helen Keller.
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The Price of Debt
“I lived alone for three years in Brooklyn, paying $1,700 a month ($61,200 all told) for a pretty but small one-bedroom within eyeshot of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. I also spent $400 a month on health insurance. At one point I thought I would find another full-time job after finishing the book, but then I must have convinced myself that teaching yoga part time would better enable my writing.” Emily Gould on poverty and the writing life.
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Crash Course
Koa Beck’s father gave her a copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying when she was 15 years old. Depending on your persuasion, this was either a brilliant idea or an awful parental blunder. Regardless, Beck says the book (aided by The Bell Jar and Diary of a Mad Housewife) helped her understand that “the game was rigged, that everyone was lying, [and] that there was so much more to being a woman than what society said there was.”
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Arrested Development Meets Academia
“Dr. Kristin M. Barton is seeking proposals for an edited volume … which will explore Arrested Development from a scholarly perspective,” reads a call for submissions on H-Net. I can see the titles of these essays now. Can’t you? “Desperation Economics: There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand” or “I Don’t Know What I Was Expecting: An Exploration of Dead Doves and Tragicomedy.”