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.
Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Love DNA
This week in book-related infographics, and just in time for Valentine’s Day: a look at the “Love DNA of Classic Novels.”
The Declining Agony of Influence
According to a study cited in The Guardian, contemporary authors are less likely to be influenced by classic literature than previous generations of writers.
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Kaveh Akbar Refuses to Flatten His Poetry
Kaveh Akbar discusses his newest poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, and why he avoids giving literal explanations for his work.
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Toni Morrison Changed the Literary Canon
Read our own Kaila Philo’s essay on Toni Morrison’s new book The Origin of Others and then pair it with Nell Irvin Painter’s reflection on ‘Toni Morrison’s Radical Vision of Otherness.’ “Morrison’s history of Othering represents an intervention in history on several fronts. Although the theme of desegregating the literary canon reappears in The Origin of Others, times have changed since Playing in the Dark. Surely thanks to the more multicultural, multiracial canon that Morrison helped foster, no respectable version of American literature today omits writers of color.”
Finding Your Writerly Voice with Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee offers advice on how to listen to your writerly voice and how this voice manifests and changes with each work.
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Reject Yourself!
The first time’s always the hardest, right? Well, what if you could dull the pain of future rejection letters by preempting your favorite publication’s editors? That’s right. Now you can reject yourself with the Rejection Generator. And just to show that we’re not taking sides on this issue, check out some of the utter dross agents and editors get offered on a daily basis.
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The Times on the New Bolaño
Dwight Garner reviews the new collection of Roberto Bolaño nonfiction in The Times. “The odd jobs and left-handed journalism that fill Between Parentheses matter because of the way his novels loom over the past half-century of Latin American fiction.”
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