Out this week: Mislaid by Nell Zink; A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me by David Gates; Odd Woman in the City by Vivian Gornick; The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North; The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry; Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimechkie; The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger; England and Other Stories by Graham Swift; and War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Zink; Gates; Gornick; North; Perry; Dimechkie; Leipciger; Swift; Robinson; Kovite
“The void was me.”
Recommended Reading: an excerpt from Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss’s The Desert Places.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Mansbach, Christensen, Ball, Nom de Plumes
Adam Mansbach’s “viral,” tongue-in-cheek kids’ book for adults, Go the F–k to Sleep is now out. We interviewed Mansbach years ago, pre-frenzy, about other matters. This week also offers up a pair of much anticipated novels for the literary set, The Astral by Kate Christensen (don’t miss Edan’s interview with Christensen today) and The Curfew by Jesse Ball, and a rather specialized tome for fans of literary history, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.
●
●
“We see these wounded women everywhere”
The latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review features Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” one of the most popular essays from her new collection, The Empathy Exams, which was reviewed for The Millions this past week.
Galway Kinnell Passes Away
“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” Galway Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won a Pulitzer in 1983, passed away Tuesday.
●
●
Ask Ayn (Rand)
“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
●
●
“This Book is Delicious!”
The German design firm Korefe partnered up with Gerstenberg Publishing to release a special edition cookbook that’s edible. The recipes have been imprinted on fresh pasta pages which can be baked into a lasagna. (via)
Kickstarter Trumps the NEA
Kickstarter is expecting to raise more than $150 million for its users’ projects in 2012. That’s $4 million more than the “entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts.” Maybe it’s because the NEA is wasting all of its money on that $1.3 billion poem…
●
●