Young/Adult
Poetry of Brotherhood
Recommended Reading: The Missouri Review’s new poem of the week, Kai Carlson-Wee’s “Jesse James Days,” which also won its 2013 Editors’ Prize. “If I carried your name to the skateparks and railroad temples of rust, would you come to me, brother.”
Longlist Released for the Guardian First Book Award
The Guardian picked its longlist for the 15th annual First Book Award, and it features selections from both NoViolet Bulawayo and Donal Ryan – two authors named to this year’s Booker Longlist as well.
●
●
Jack Kerouac’s Journals
It’s hard to resist reading others’ diary entries, especially when the diaries in question belong to famous writers. Now that a selection of Jack Kerouac‘s journals is being released from The New Yorker archives and made available online, resistance is more or less futile. Originally published in 1998, these journal entries span the years from 1948 to 1950, from just after the long drive that inspired On the Road to the publication of Kerouac’s first book, The Town and the City.
●
●
Talking with Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell has a new book out, and to mark the occasion, he talks with Dwyer Murphy of Guernica about his upcoming book tour, Southern poverty and the rejections Winter’s Bone received. Sample quote: “When my family started doing better and my parents encouraged my brothers and me to succeed beyond them, we started asking why our parents were telling us to strive so hard to live in these neighborhoods full of people they clearly resented—and feared too, I think.”
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Sahota; O’Brien; Doyle; Warren; Majmudar; Poole; Parini
New this week: The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota; The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien; Chicago by Brian Doyle; The Destroyer in the Glass by Noah Warren; Dothead by Amit Majmudar; Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Millions contributor Buzz Poole; and New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 by Jay Parini. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
A Debut
Maaza Mengiste, an old school chum, gets high praise from Claire Messud for her debut, the “extraordinary novel” Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
●
●