Out this week: Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg; Muse by Jonathan Galassi; The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida; Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave; The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus; The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein; A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay; I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby; The Loved Ones by Mary-Beth Hughes; A History of Money by Alan Pauls; Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly; and Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Attenberg; Galassi; Vida; Dave; McManus; Dinerstein; Tremblay; Goolsby; Hughes; Pauls, Parajuly; Charyn
concerning
For those of you who’ve ever wondered to what extent e.e. cummings wrote prose the way he wrote poetry, there’s this letter to consider, published by The Paris Review Daily to commemorate the poet’s birthday. It’s addressed to Ezra Pound, and it features phrases including but not limited to “macarchibald maclapdog macleash.”
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n+1 Podcast with Sam Lipsyte
You can stream n+1‘s podcast with Sam Lipsyte. It “chronicle[s] Lipsyte’s journey from his role as ‘Lead Screamer’ for the punk-rock band Dungbeetle to the publication of his third novel, The Ask.”
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The Book Club to End All Book Clubs
A long discussion of Tenth of December that includes George Saunders himself? Why, Rumpus Book Club, you’re too kind.
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Mind Games
“I suspect ‘chess rage’ and ‘road rage’ are neighboring neural impulses.” Tom Russell at Guernica Magazine has written a fascinating essay on a summer spent playing chess in Bryant Park and the unexpected artistic beauty of the game. Here’s a cursorily-related review of The Chess Machine, a book which features an unbeatable chess-playing automaton controlled by a dwarf.
Putin Wins the World Cup
“Putin, like Hitler, understood that the purpose of spectacles is to dazzle the eye while clouding the mind.” For the Daily Beast, staff writer Bill Morris writes about the thuggish dictators who love the propaganda of the World Cup. (If you haven’t already checked out our list of seven great soccer reads, do it now!)
Bright Young Thing
Who is Samantha Shannon, and why should you care about her? Well, for starters, she’s twenty-one years old, her debut novel The Bone Season is coming out next week, and her publisher suspects she may be the next J.K. Rowling.