Out this week: Young Skins by Colin Barrett; Decoy by Allan Gurganus; The Unloved by Deborah Levy; Aquarium by David Vann; The Sellout by Paul Beatty; Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s first new novel in ten years (which our own Lydia Kiesling reviewed yesterday). For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Barrett; Gurganus; Levy; Vann; Beatty; McGuane; Ishiguro
A Death Certificate and Memorial Combined
“A ‘Complete Poems’ is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet’s official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages.” At The Guardian John Banville reviews The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin which will be out on these shores in March.
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Ferlinghetti’s Journals Forthcoming
95-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti plans to publish his travel journals in September 2015, reports SFGate. The journals should cover his experience as a submarine chaser in World War II through his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, as well as his travels through Central and South America later on.
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Lewis Carroll on Writers’ Block
Experiencing writers’ block? Lewis Carroll has a few tips to help you out. We revisited Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass following Tim Burton’s film release.
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More Baffler
We recently noted the return of The Baffler. Robert Birnbaum recently interviewed the magazine’s new publisher John H. Summers.
Thunder Thighs
Recommended Reading: This important essay from Gayle Branedis at The Rumpus on our cultural obsession with women’s thighs.
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“An opus d’odure”
Heaven forbid someone ever draws parallels between your writing and that of “Robert Rabelais the Younger.” For his work, published in the nineteenth century, has been described as “the most appallingly bad epic poem to have ever been written in English, comprised of 384 interminable pages of doggerel verse devoid of any literary merit, an opus d’odure that screams stinkburger.” (And that’s one of the more positive evaluations.)
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Triumph of the Vanity Press?
Is Sergio de la Pava‘s A Naked Singularity the first great self-published novel of the new century? Aren’t you at least a little bit curious?
The Portable Betty Draper
The literary lineage of Mad Men‘s Betty Draper extends to Edith Wharton and Margaret Mead, argues Laura Tanenbaum in a new issue of Open Letters Monthly.
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