Recommended reading: Peter Hessler writes about spending a week on tour with his Chinese censor.
A Censor’s Tour
Miss Masterpiece
"The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan." On Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkest American masterpiece.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Grey, Clowes, Enright, Shin
The much discussed Fifty Shades of Grey arrives as a paperback today, though one wonders if readers will be as willing to read it if they must shed the privacy of the e-reader. Also out is the gorgeous retrospective, The Art of Daniel Clowes. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and MAN Asian Literary Prize winner Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin are new in paperback.
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“I was on the edge of crazy.”
Recommended Reading: the first two chapters of Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, which are available courtesy of Longreads.
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Something Whole
"The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders," the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because "despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end."
Annals of great profile writing
If you're looking for some midweek longreads, here are two excellent profile pieces: Emily Nussbaum's unabashed enthusiasm for Lena Dunham as HBO's Girls gears up for release, and Adam Sternbergh on Mark Leyner, whose The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is out today.
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“It’s Spring when I realize that I may never have children.”
If you love stories about conception, infertility, baby gorillas, cicadas, and roundabout references to Virginia Woolf, you're going to love Belle Boggs' "The Art of Waiting" in Orion Magazine.
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