Recommended Reading: Maria Russo’s Times review of the new Dr. Seuss book. (If you haven’t yet, go check out Michiko Kakutani’s companion review-in-verse.
Guinea Pig, Actual Pig
Dido’s Lament
Listen to Tessa Hadley read her story “Dido’s Lament” from the August 8th and 15th issue of The New Yorker. If you’re looking for the Aeneid, we recently had Virgil day here at The Millions.
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After the Storm, a Novel
“What stereotypes will they critique, destroy, or create? What, in other words, will the post-earthquake novel reveal about Haiti’s most recent losses, obstacles, and hopes for the future?” Patti Marxsen on the post-earthquake Haitian novel, over at The Critical Flame.
Let’s Start a Gallery of Found Art
“Italian art historians claim they have found 100 previously unknown works by Caravaggio.”
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A Conversation with Morgan Parker
On his podcast, David Naimon spoke with poet Morgan Parker about her new collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s a book “at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence,” Naimon says. (Bonus: Parker’s book was recently featured in Nick Ripatrazone’s list of five poetry collections you should buy.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers, Dubus, Freeman, Boyd, Zoller-Seitz
New this week: The Circle by Dave Eggers; Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III; How to Read a Novelist by former Granta editor John Freeman; Solo, a new James Bond novel by William Boyd; and “the first in-depth overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography” by the New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller-Seitz.
Tuesday New Release Day: Burton; Smith; Vreeland; Pitre; Earley; Dennis
New this week: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton; The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith; Lisette’s List by Susan Vreeland; Fives and Twenty Fives by Michael Pitre; Mr. Tall by Tony Earley; and Love, of a Kind by Felix Dennis. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
Liminal Literature
Vol. 1 Brooklyn‘s Tobias Carroll presents a roundup of the best new literature blurring the lines between writing and the visual arts, including works that made cameos in Paul Auster‘s Leviathan and Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. We reviewed the latter novel a year ago here.
Six Plots
We are all by now familiar with J.K. Rowling‘s elaborate, hand-drawn outlines for the Harry Potter series, but what if all plots could be simplified further? Down to, let’s say, graphs? And not even an infinite number of graphs, but just six? The Paris Review considers the work of Matthew Jockers, a literature professor who studies “the relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction.”