New this week: The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon; A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson; The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato; The Love Object by Edna O’Brien; The New World by Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz; Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes; Paris, He Said by Christine Sneed; Hugo & Rose by Bridget Foley; and Scavenger Loop by David Baker. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hemon; Atkinson; Disabato; O’Brien; Adrian; Vermes; Sneed; Foley; Baker
Twerking with Morgan Freeman
You might have heard that "twerk" (among other words) has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. But you probably didn't hear Morgan Freeman reading the definition aloud.
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Wait, What Was I Writing About?
In a fantastic piece for Full-Stop, Jesse Miller checks out Nicholas Carr (whose book was picked in Jonathan Safran Foer's Year in Reading), Paul La Farge, David Foster Wallace, and our diminishing ability to concentrate.
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On Magna Opera
Nabokov fans, brace yourselves! Roxana Robinson makes a case against Lolita, “a brilliant book in many ways, but not a masterpiece.”
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Oh Doctor
Recommended Reading: Frances Stonor Saunders on Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago.
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The Crisis of Criticism
“Then there’s the no-one-reads-anymore hysteria, the lack of supportive careers for apprenticing writers, the MFA deathtrap, etc. It feels self-indulgent as a critic to say, ‘But the whole critical structure has broken down, let’s talk about that.’ The critic only comes into play when the books are actually produced and put onto the market, meaning their jobs are tied into this whole decaying, rotting mess of an industry.” Jessa Crispin writes on the self-hating book critic.
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