Out this week: The Animals by Christian Kiefer; The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos; A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell; The Lost Boys Symphony by Mark Andrew Ferguson; The Wisdom of Perversity by Rafael Yglesias; The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto; The Wednesday Group by Sylvia True; Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade; and Notes from a Dead House, a new Dostoevsky translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (whom we’ve interviewed). For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Kiefer; de los Santos; Mitchell; Ferguson; Yglesias; Bhutto; True, Quade; Dostoevsky
Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
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A Curious Ambivalence
Colin Dickey for Hazlitt has written a fascinating essay exploring the myth and superstition behind the ritual veiling of mirrors while in mourning. Did our own Sonya Chung cover her mirror while she mourned the passing of Mad Men?
Double Shot of Granta
Here’s a double shot of Recommended Reading courtesy of Granta: Open City author Teju Cole on going blind, and Book of Clouds author Chloe Aridjis on Soviet-era cosmonauts.
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Wardrobe A-Z
No idea what to wear to your next reading? Need to know the best sock pattern to wear while discussing magical realism? Want to coordinate your nail polish to your Amazon ranking? Buzzfeed's here to help with this "Illustrated A-Z Guide to Author Wardrobe Staples."
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Something To Think About This Sunday
Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo author Mark Bowden explains the "hardest job in football" in this Atlantic article from 2009.
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Curiosities: Ooga-Booga
We've already got several RSVPs for our NYC indie bookstore walking tour. Get all the details and RSVP if you want to be notified of any schedule changes.The Millions' Collaborative Atlas of Book Stores and Literary Places is still being added to by our enterprising readers. London in particular is now bristling with points of interest including many bookstores and destinations like St Pancras' Old Church, where you'll find the graves of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.Wyatt Mason's terrific profile of the poet Frederick Seidel is a must-read.Slate's Troy Patterson describes the achievement of German sensation Wetlands in autoproctological terms.The William H. Gass site Tunneling posts some remarkable images of Gass' home library, originally published in 2007 in St. Louis Magazine.L.J. Davis, financial journalist and author of the recently reissued novel A Meaningful Life, offers an insider's look at house-flipping during booms... and busts.Is a two-novelist marriage sustainable? (from Canteen)And what's up with J.D. Salinger these days, anyway? (via)Philip Hensher looks back at novels from the dawn of the Thatcher era.Can't get enough of poet Nathaniel Bellows? Listen to him read.Is Barnes & Noble hoping to arrive better late than never to the ebook reader party?"Wendell Steavenson went looking for remorse among the men who served Saddam Hussein. Her fruitless search, George Packer writes, has produced one of the few lasting works to come out of the Iraq war."Google gets even better at scanning books.Green Apple Books talks about "cool books we'll never sell."