Out this week: Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen; The Jezebel Remedy by Martin Clark; Second Life by S.J. Watson; The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall; Language Arts by Stephanie Kallos; The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka; Valley Fever by Katherine Taylor; and Rise by Karen Campbell. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Cohen; Clark; Watson; Hall; Kallos; Wodicka; Taylor; Campbell
Polish Book Covers
An eerie collection of Polish book cover art from the 1970s and 80s.
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Error 404: Identity Not Found
At Full-Stop this week, an interview with Joshua Cohen, whose new book, Four New Messages, spans “a wide geographic and narrative terrain.” Back in August, Johannes Lichtman gave his own take on the collection, as did Shannon Elderon at The Rumpus.
Miss Masterpiece
“The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan.” On Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkest American masterpiece.
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“I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”
“I never started out as a children’s book artist. What is a children’s-book artist? A moron! Some ugly fat pip-squick of a person who can’t be bothered to grow up. That’s the way we’re treated in the adult world of publishing.” The Believer interviews the late Maurice Sendak, who passed away last May.
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In a Fugue State
“Could I write a novel about fugues in the form of a fugue?” Margot Singer wonders in The Paris Review, remembering the process of writing her first novel and considering other authors – Joyce, Nabokov, Woolf – who have tried to compose words musically. See also: our own Jacob Lambert on whether to write with background music on.
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