Need some more poetry in your life? Catch up on the year’s best collections. At Page-Turner, Dan Chiasson chooses nine books he predicts will be read in a hundred years, including Corridor by Saskia Hamilton and Go Giants by Nick Laird. FYI, I wrote a Curiosity about one of Chiasson’s picks.
Nine Poetries
Summer Reading
The Los Angeles Times presents a list of 60 new books to read this summer.
Head in a Book
Pen, paper, and a brain scan: the newest trend in literary criticism might be “neurohumanities.”
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Comma Confessional
“One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Mary Norris‘s “Confessions of a Comma Queen,” from the New Yorker.
The Broken Novel
Literary fiction is falling apart, but it might be for the best, Ted Gioia writes. In his essay, he explores the history of the fragmented novel (or the polyphonic novel as we’ve written about before) from Winesburg, Ohio to A Visit From the Goon Squad and fittingly, he does it in fragments.
Football Book Club: Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’
This week, Football Book Club is taking it to the next level: They’re reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and posting about Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. If you’re keeping score at home, that means this week is All Brosh, All the Time. Also, as per usual, they will not be watching the NFL and not liking it one bit.
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E-book Release Delays
An article in the Wall Street Journal about the third publishing house — HarperCollins, who joined Simon & Schuster and Hachette — to delay e-book publication of new (hardcover) titles. The debate over timing and pricing of new-release e-books (@$9.99) continues.
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Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn; Dyer; Nelson; Lane; O’Donnell; Zeh; Tolkien
Out this week: Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn; Another Great Day at Sea by Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer; Funny Once by Antonya Nelson; Black Lake by Johanna Lane; Closed Doors by Lisa O’Donnell; Decompression by the German writer Juli Zeh; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, published now for the first time. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.