New this week: Academy Street by Mary Costello; The Children’s Crusade by Ann Packer; After the Tall Timber by Renata Adler; Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry; A Slant of Light by Jeffrey Lent; The Water Museum by Luis Alberto Urrea; All Involved by Ryan Gattis; Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri; The Language of Paradise by Barbara Klein Moss; and Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes and I Refuse, two books by Per Petterson. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Costello; Packer; Adler; Barry; Lent; Urrea; Gattis; Chaudhuri; Moss; Petterson
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
Year in Reading alum Maria Popova of Brain Pickings writes her first book review for The New York Times on Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall, a Harvard cosmologist. Randall proposes ”that a thin disk of dark matter in the plane of the Milky Way triggered a minor perturbation in deep space that caused the major earthly catastrophe that decimated the dinosaurs.” Jenny Hendrix writes about modern-day extinction for The Millions.
●
●
Coates: A Public Intellectual
The New York Times profiles MacArthur Genius and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates as one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. His book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (which we have been anticipating for months) is released this Tuesday.
Book Coverage As Premium Content
The Chicago Tribune is rolling out a new premium books section for $99 a year. The Printers Row offering (named for a Chicago neighborhood) “will feature 24 pages of book reviews, author interviews and Chicago-focused literary news, along with a weekly bonus book of short fiction.” You can either feel validated (special HBO-style “premium” section for readers!) or marginalized (so few people care about this that you have to pay extra if you want it.)
Mailerrific
Electric Literature held a Twitter contest recently in which their followers invented new literary neologisms for a chance to win copies of Carson Mell’s new e-book Saguaro. For my money, the clear winner was “Vonnegutsy: having the fortitude to mix aspects of genre fiction with literary fiction.”
●
●
“No real diminishment was possible.”
Clive James gives Pauline Kael a serious critical appreciation in The Atlantic. Last year, The Millions also showed Kael some love, in this review of The Age of Movies.
●
●
Literary Rivalries Revisited
Lulah Ellender reflects on literary rivalries throughout history, including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, and more.
●
●
●
New Eggers Novel Gets Release Date
Well, it turns out that Dutch bookselling site was right after all. In three weeks, Dave Eggers will release his latest novel, A Hologram For the King. The author gives some more information in an interview with The Rumpus‘ Stephen Elliott, but it seems pretty crazy how this isn’t being talked about more.
●
●