Out this week: Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh; Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami; The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman; Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson; Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville; The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski; Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jeanine Capo Crucet; and The Daughters by Adrienne Celt. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ghosh; Murakami; Hoffman; Jackson; Miéville; Brelinski; Crucet; Celt
The Scream
Edvard Munch’s The Scream recently garnered a record breaking $119.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Despite the “tasty narrative potential” of the iconic artwork, the Pulitizer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter thinks that the painting’s new owner spent their vast sum of money unwisely.
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Still I Rise
Maya Angelou reciting “Still I Rise“–in case you’re feeling be-Job-ed today and need of the consolation of literature or if you have doubts about the existence of true poetry in the present age. (Printed text of the poem is here.)
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Can Cash Money be Caro’s Next Project?
Eric Brightwell has written a great primer on “the independent years” of Cash Money Records (ca. 1991-1998). Now that the outfit has its own publishing arm, Cash Money Content, I suggest you brush up.
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On Wodehouse’s Other Writing
“For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing,” Ed Park says of P.G. Wodehouse’s collected correspondence, A Life in Letters. The Year in Reading alum goes on to note that “a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years.”
New Murakami in the Pipeline
It’s being reported that Haruki Murakami will have a new novel out in Japan in April, though, based on prior publication schedules, it will likely be quite a bit longer before an English translation is published.
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Place Your Bids
“I’ve learnt so much from this profound novelist about nuance, understatement, technique.” Eighteen handwritten homages to Jane Austen by well-known writers are up for auction until tomorrow. Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, and Ian McEwan are among the authors whose tributes will raise funds for the Royal Society of Literature, reports The Guardian. And read our interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, whose most-recent novel Eligible is the ultimate literary tribute, an adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
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Not-Paper Planes
We’re not supposed to call it a hypertext, but when you’ve got some time, try playing around with Paul La Farge‘s website for Luminous Airplanes – which will eventually grow to encompass three times as much material as the print edition of the book.
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