Out this week: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante; Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg; Marvel and a Wonder by Joe Meno; The Hundred Year Flood by Matthew Salesses (who recently wrote for us); Dryland by Sara Jaffe; and Purity by Jonathan Franzen (which we reviewed). For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ferrante; Clegg; Meno; Salesses; Jaffe; Franzen
A Radical Vision
Recommended reading: this brilliant and thorough profile of Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, complete with a video of Morrison reading from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child.
Ancient Poetics
Recommended Reading: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen on translating ninth century poet Li Shangyin.
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The Great Silence
“I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?” New short fiction from Ted Chiang over at Electric Literature (and introduced by Year in Reading alum Karen Jay Fowler)! Pair with our encyclopedic survey of primate lit.
Need Not Apply
“It may be vanity on my part … but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in.” A 68-year-old aspiring writer has accused the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of age discrimination, reports The Los Angeles Times. In his complaint, Dan Thomson cites “statistics from the program that reveal that, in the last five years, just over 100 would-be graduate students over the age of 50 applied to the program, but none made the cut.” Doesn’t he know you don’t need an MFA, anyway?
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The Destruction of a Ruin
Recommended Reading: Teju Cole meditates on the destruction of the Baalshamin temple in Palmyra, Syria at The New Inquiry. “The destruction of a ruin is like the desecration of a body. It is a vengeance wreaked on the past in order to embitter the future.“