Out this week: Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta; After the Parade by Lori Ostlund; Hotel by Joanna Walsh; The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi; Succession by Livi Michael; Selected Later Poems by C.K. Williams; and Notes on the Assemblage by Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Okparanta; Ostlund; Walsh; Alsanousi; Michael; Williams; Herrera
Tuesday New Release Day: Strayed, Iweala, Claudel, Andersen, Boyne, Hemingway, Dream Team, Pollack
Cheryl Strayed's collection of "Dear Sugar" columns is out this week (read our review). Also out are Our Kind of People by Uzodinma Iweala, The Investigation by Philippe Claudel, True Believers by Kurt Andersen, and The Absolutist by John Boyne. The new edition of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms with all the extra endings is out, as is (just in time for the Olympics) an oral history of the original Dream Team. Donald Ray Pollack's The Devil All the Time is out in paperback.
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Huxley’s Closes His Doors of Perception
Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley requested a dose of LSD as he succumbed to laryngeal cancer in 1963. Three weeks later, Huxley’s widow, Laura Archera, wrote a letter describing the experience (“the most beautiful death”) to her brother-in-law. Today the prescription of psychedelic drugs to terminally ill patients is less uncommon than you might expect.
The Reindeer Uprising
“There was an inefficient system in place, and what I did was subvert it by an external rotation of reluctant holly jollies. Nasally, I came to understand that light is a thing that is produced through the collision of particulates, and boy isn’t that the truth.” As part of their year-end review, McSweeney’s republished their ten most popular pieces of 2014, including the above. Its title? “Donald Barthelme Narrates the Progress of the Reindeer.”
The Blood Countess
Julie Delphy's second film as writer/director/actress is released in Europe this month. The subject is 16th century Hungarian/Transylvanian countess Erzsébet Bàthory, known for murdering young girls to bathe in their blood and considered by some the first female serial killer. Judging from the trailer, Delphy's film doesn't appear to equal earlier visions of the Bloody Countess (French Surrealist Valentine Penrose's hallucinatory biography, for example, or Terry Gilliam's Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci) in The Brothers Grimm).
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Urvashi Butalia on Indian Small Presses
Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali For Women, in 1984. In 2003, they parted ways to start their own projects: Menon began Women Unlimited; Butalia founded Zubaan Books. Now, in a compressed and edited interview for Mint, Butalia discusses some of the challenges she faces in India’s publishing ecosystem, and also notes, “in my 40 years in publishing, things have never felt as exciting as they are now. It truly seems there are infinite possibilities.”
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Going Rogue: The Unauthorized Index
Slate corrects an oversight to Sarah Palin's otherwise impeccably edited memoir: no index. Theirs runs from "Alaska, autumn bouquet of" (page 1) to "'you betcha' - revelation of as not actually Alaska's state motto" (page 309), and includes such helpful detours as "exclamation point, usage of" (pages 4, 26, 120, 121, 122, 138, 150...) You almost - almost - don't have to read the book.
Google Books’s Impasse
"When it started almost 15 years ago, [Google Books] ... seemed impossibly ambitious," writes Scott Rosenberg. "An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world." But these days, Google's moonshot has turned into a "mundane reality." How?