Recommended listening: Waywords and Meansigns, a new project that’s set out to record Finnegans Wake in its entirety and set it to music. The complete work will be released on May 4th, but there are already a few samples available online.
Waywords and Meansigns
Gibson Girl
“By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.” Edna Saint Vincent Millay, trendsetter.
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Lewisohn’s Beatles Biography Hits Another Snag
Leading Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn has been working on a three-volume biography of the Liverpool band for almost a decade. Tentatively titled The Beatles: The Complete Story, the first installment was due for a publication date this year. Unfortunately, Volume One, which tracks the group from the beginning through December 1962, has hit yet another delay, and fans likely won’t see it until 2013. As Lewisohn says, the accuracy takes time, and “the whole ethos of the project is ‘do the job properly’.” Lewisohn’s last work was the 2006 Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.
Forsooth
You might think that recording an audiobook would be an easy task for Ice-T. Not so, or at least not always: the rapper and Law & Order star says an upcoming book in the Dungeons and Dragons universe tripped him up with its heavy use of fantasy slang. (h/t The Paris Review)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Poeppel; Schwalbe; Scalzi
Out this week: Small Admissions by Amy Poeppel; Books for Living by Will Schwalbe; and Miniatures by John Scalzi. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
The Great Indie Bookstore Tour
In 2013, poet and bookseller Alan Brandsted approached Seattle’s Wave Books with an interesting proposal: in exchange for a box of galleys and gas money, he would embark on a cross-country mission to “spread the good word of poetry to independent bookstores.” What followed is the ongoing Indie Bookstore Tour, which is being chronicled on Tumblr (hashtag “#wavepoetrytour”) and Instagram. (First Tumblr post can be found here.)
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Luck Runs Out
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“A rabbi…once said all Western literature was commentary on the Torah. I’ll buy that exaggeration”
Seventeen Jewish authors weigh in on the question “is there such a thing as Jewish fiction?,” recalling Gabriel Brownstein’s excellent inquiry, “Are You, Or Have you Ever Been, a Jewish Writer?”