“She didn’t even want to be anything. She just wanted to be able to sit in a room and not feel tortured by it, which is sort of the human condition in general. Eileen isn’t dreaming of leaving home and making it in the big city on Broadway. She just wants to go and eat a banana, you know?” Ottessa Moshfegh on her new novel, Eileen, for The Rumpus.
Do I Dare to Eat a Banana?
Amazon Announces New KindleMatchBook Program
Amazon just announced a new program entitled Kindle MatchBook, “giv[ing] customers the option to buy—for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free—the Kindle edition of print books they have purchased new from Amazon.” MatchBook will include purchases made as far back as 1995, so you are officially out of excuses when it comes to cracking that lofty, intimidating TBR pile in your house.
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Alias Atwood
Following on the success of Hulu's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Netflix teases a first trailer for its take on Alias Grace. Read our review of the former here.
Just a Game
Recommended Reading: On playing games and the cult of productivity.
New Philip Pullman!
His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman has reportedly completed another trilogy, The Book of Dust, that will publish in October of this year. The new works "will stand alongside his bestselling series," sources say.
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Marlon James’s Dark Star Trilogy
A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James was struck by the whiteness of The Hobbit, and in an interview for Entertainment Weekly, he explains it inspired him to write his own fantasy series based on African epic traditions. “It’s sort of like my being a scholar of African history and mythology, and my being a total sci-fi/fantasy geek who rereads things like The Mists of Avalon, they just sort of came together,” James said. He’s targeting a Fall 2018 release for the first book.
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Citizen Bezos
Jeff Bezos married a novelist, "expressed a passionate devotion to books", and may be the one person mild-mannered indie bookshop owners hate more than any other. How'd that happen? After perusing a short history from the New York Review of Books, see for yourself with our vintage news announcements on Amazon's innovations in pay-per-page pricing, now-old products like the Kindle, and its industry-changing acquisitions of The Washington Post and the English language.
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