Recommended Reading: Critic James Wood for the New Yorker on one of the most significant literary heroes of the Holocaust, Primo Levi. The three-volume Complete Works of Primo Levi is out this week.
Irony and Equanimity
Happy Birthday, New Directions
Powell’s is celebrating New Directions’ 75th birthday by offering a 30% discount on select titles.
On the Spectrum
What color would The Little Prince be? Before you dismiss this as an inane question, artist Jaz Parkinson created color signatures based on how often books mentioned certain hues. The results look like a better Rothko painting. Pair with: Radiolab’s fascinating podcast on the science of color.
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Fin
How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful — she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung’s essay on literary endings.)
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Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murphy, Scocca, Schulman, Whitehouse
New this week: Yannick Murphy’s latest novel The Call is out this week, as is Tom Scocca’s chronicle of expat life, Beijing Welcomes You (Both are written up in our big second-half preview). Also arriving is a new novel from Helen Schulman, This Beautiful Life, and Bed, the debut effort of David Whitehouse, which has already been a (minor) prizewinner in the UK, and which the publisher compares to A Confederacy of Dunces.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Tangled Legacy
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland, is known for her feminist classics—but she was also a devotee of eugenics.
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Kevin Nguyen at It Again
“[P]ublishing is a behemoth that is trudging along slowly in the direction of progress. But it still has a long way to go.” GQ editor and Year-in-Reading alum Kevin Nguyen gets the interview treatment from Poets & Writers (and gives a few shout-outs to us while he’s at it!). Among the books he’s read in the last year that stood out: “White Tears by Hari Kunzru by a mile.”