You may have heard that E.L. Doctorow passed away last week. The Ragtime and Billy Bathgate author was known for his mastery of historical fiction. At The Guardian, Michael Chabon offers a tribute, arguing that Doctorow found a way out of the binary trap between postmodernism and realism.
Third Way
When We Were Young
Over at the Catapult, Nicole Chung has launched a series on adoption, featuring essays by Megan Galbraith and James Han Mattson. You could also check out Matthew Salesses’s Millions essay on inciting incidents and new beginnings as an adoptee.
Free Poetry!
How would like to receive some free issues of Poetry magazine for your book club? Poetry, by the way, answered our call in our Tumblr round-up and has since joined the platform.
Tuesday Means New Releases
Celebrate today’s arrival of John Irving’s new novel Last Night in Twisted River by seeing where it falls on Wikipedia’s John Irving recurring themes matrix. Also new today is Paul Auster’s Invisible and a new collection of Paris Review interviews (including, among others, Marilynne Robinson, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth). Speaking of Roth, his new novel The Humbling came out last week.
Best New Poets
Poets, rejoice! Tracy K. Smith’s selections for Best New Poets 2015 have been announced. After you’ve checked them out, go take a look at Sophia Nguyen’s Millions essay on Smith’s newest memoir Ordinary Light.
Life on Mars
“One of the advantages to being a novelist is removing oneself from the chatter of the fray and trying to get a read and a historical context on what’s happening in one’s own time.” The Guardian interviews Rachel Kushner about women’s prisons, remorse, and her new novel, The Mars Room. Pair with: our review calls Kushner’s latest a “brutal, unforgiving, and often grimly funny tour de force of wasted lives.”
I Want YOU to be the Next Tournament of Books Judge
Do you have what it takes to be a judge in The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books? If so, your application better be in by midnight Friday.
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Time Out of Mind
Are we now living in a golden age of the uncanny? The Millions contributor Porochista Khakpour suspects that we are, and she also suspects that our historical moment, populated as it is with alienating developments and surreal art, is key to understanding the work of Helen Oyeyemi. In the Times, Khakpour reviews Oyeyemi’s new novel. (You could also read both writers’ Year in Reading pieces.)
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