Out this week: A Good Family by Erik Fassnacht; Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb; A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan; You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman; The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick; and a limited edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Fassnacht; Gottlieb; Egan; Kleeman; Goolrick; Gaiman
Bad Credit
As we noted here recently about the rise and fall of Motown, the real issue was money — who earned it, who kept it, who never saw it. Now Barrett Strong, who co-wrote and sang the Detroit label’s first hit in 1959, “Money (That’s What I Want),” tells The New York Times that he never saw a penny of royalties for a song that became a classic and generated millions of dollars for the label. Strong’s story is the story of Motown boiled down to its bitter, ironic essence.
Rebecca Solnit on the Value of Nonlinear Narratives
Solnit's work mirrors the workings of a living, breathing ecosystem, and calling it an essay collection shows a "failure to recognize internal cohesion."
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For Franzen Haters
Do you hate Jonathan Franzen (and/or contemporary literature generally)? Then you’ll love B.R. Myers‘ take on him at The Atlantic.
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omg omg omg
The first known use of O.M.G. was in 1917, in a letter sent to Winston Churchill.
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Prize Stories
For Electric Literature, Kelly Luce shares what she noticed while reading short story submissions for the O. Henry Prize. Pair with Paul Vidich’s Millions piece about the future of the short story.
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Coetzee Archive to the Harry Ransom Center
The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas made headlines when it acquired the David Foster Wallace archives. Now it’s added another high profile author to its collection: J. M. Coetzee.
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As American as Borscht
Nabokov once described himself “as American as April in Arizona,” which is an odd thing to call yourself when you’re a lepidopterist Russian expat. In Nabokov in America, Robert Roper explores why Nabokov felt he was so American, and how his journey to that identity influenced his writing of Lolita. At The Literary Review, Ian Sansom reviews Roper’s book.