Out this week: Sweetland by Michael Crummey; Glow by Ned Beauman; Frog by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski; A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera; Black River by S.M. Hulse; Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; My Father’s Wives by the ESPN host Mike Greenberg; and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Crummey; Beauman; Yan; Wisniewski; Kapoor; Galera; Hulse; Hooper; Greenberg; Whitehouse
The Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Poets wants to build The Bridge, a social networking site aimed at connecting student poets with mentor poets. The idea is that students could find mentors for less money than a workshop or writing program might cost, and that mentors would be able to get paid without having to locate a hard-to-find teaching job. You can get a fuller idea of the plan on the organization’s IndieGoGo page.
Ciao, Napoli
Elena Ferrante uses a pseudonym. We may not know her given name, but we do know her home city – Naples. Read about realism in her work from Irene Caselli, who also calls Naples home. Want to know more about Ferrante? She does interviews.
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2010: The Year of the Literary Dystopia?
Our own Emily Mandel may have been onto something with her “catastrophic” summer reading list; dystopia seems to be all the rage this summer. The WSJ sets Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death in “a dystopian United States that is halfway between Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Woody Allen’s Sleeper.” The SF Chron calls Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story “literature’s first dystopian epistolary romantic satire.” And later this year, as we noted this month, will be Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez, which focuses on a cultish community in the dystopian aftermath of a flu pandemic.
We All Pay It Off in the Next Five Millenia
Attention all victims of debt: the author of the well-named Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, is now taking your questions on Reddit.
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The FBI Analyzes Gone Girl
Recommended viewing: an FBI agent takes a look at Amy Dunne’s story from Gone Girl and, surprise!, finds it a little lacking.
Writing as Advocacy
“There’s this sense of guilt that my writing career is going well because black people are being killed. I’ve reached a point where I don’t know if I have anything new to say. It’s the same narrative over and over.” Debut novelist Brit Bennett gets profiled for The New York Times about The Mothers, which we included in the list of October book releases we’re most excited about.
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