This week, Football Book Club will be reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and posting essays about Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Going Clear was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and has been turned into a documentary by HBO.
Football Book Club: Lawrence Wright’s ‘Going Clear’
The President’s Summer
President Barack Obama shared his official summer reading list, featuring the likes of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
Shakespeare’s Secret Son?
Shakespeare may have had a son who later became the poet laureate of England. Find out more about him in Simon Andrew Stirling’s new book, Shakespeare’s Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant. Pair with Stephen Akey’s reflections on Shakespeare as God.
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“Ish” Writes to Granta
From Granta, we learn that Kazuo Ishiguro likes to go by “Ish.”
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A Not so Steamy First Time
Jesse Bering on his incredibly inelegant first time writing about sex. Cf. his most recent adventures of writing about sex, his new book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sahota; O’Brien; Doyle; Warren; Majmudar; Poole; Parini
New this week: The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota; The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien; Chicago by Brian Doyle; The Destroyer in the Glass by Noah Warren; Dothead by Amit Majmudar; Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Millions contributor Buzz Poole; and New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 by Jay Parini. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Barnes and Noble’s Black Friday Plan
Today is the much-discussed Black Friday, and Barnes and Noble has recruited prominent authors including Donna Tartt and David Mitchell to help raise holiday sales. The plan? To sell roughly 500,000 signed books.
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