Out this week: Local Girls by Caroline Zancan; The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson; The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens; Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters; Killing Monica by Candace Bushnell; and a new translation of the poems of Catullus.
Tuesday New Release Day: Zancan; Jackson; Lansens; Bushnell; Catullus
The Art of the Essay
What makes an essay literary? Over at the Kenyon Review, the editors explore language as an end in itself. Also check out H.S. Cross’s Millions essay on writing what you don’t know.
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Street Cred
Recommended Reading: Jody Rosen on Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman.
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Read Like A Victorian
The website Victorian Serial Novels lets you experience 19th-century novels “serially and in their cultural contexts.” Select your author, the timespan within which you want installments to come, and enjoy.
How to choose what to read first? Not to worry, these six Dickensian experts have you covered.
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New Marilynne Robinson On the Way
This fall, Marilynne Robinson will mark her return to a fictional plains town in Iowa with the publication of Lila, the third novel in her Gilead series. Expect the novel to be featured in our forthcoming Great Book Preview, but if you can’t wait until then, you’ve got to check out FSG’s exclusive excerpt from the book.
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Winning Women
Eleanor Catton has been getting a lot of press for being the youngest author ever to win the Man Booker prize, but she claims that the new fame is a mixed blessing that often brings up sexism. “In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them,” she told The Guardian.
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The New Yorker on the TSA
The New Yorker posts its airport security cartoons, from 1938 to the present.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Atwood, Coetzee, Woodrell, Dolnick, Davis
A new Margaret Atwood novel is out this week, as is a new book by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Also out: The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell, At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick and Duplex by Kathryn Davis. For more on these and other upcoming releases, check out our Great 2013 Second-Half Book Preview.
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