New this week: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie; The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams; The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates; This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison; Cries for Help, Various by Padgett Powell; and Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rushdie; Williams; Oates; Evison; Powell; Rash
iMortality
What would happen if you had a clock to countdown the exact number of days until you died? Our own Mark O’Connell discovers the paranoia of having the Days of Life app measure his mortality at The New Yorker. “Days of Life functions like a reductio ad absurdum of the logic of personal productivity. The pie chart becomes a special way of being afraid: an image of the self as a micro-economy of numbered days.” For a more uplifting version of O’Connell, check out his 2013 Year in Reading post.
Kubrick at the LACMA
Recommended Viewing: The Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The event will run through June 2013, but you can check out some images of the exhibit online.
Mick Jagger on Keith Richards’ New Book
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Double Shot of Granta
Here’s a double shot of Recommended Reading courtesy of Granta: Open City author Teju Cole on going blind, and Book of Clouds author Chloe Aridjis on Soviet-era cosmonauts.
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Murakami Controversy
Haruki Murakami‘s Norwegian Wood has been dropped from one New Jersey school’s syllabus due to “some words and language that seemed to be inappropriate as far as the parents and some of the kids were concerned.” His publisher A. A. Knopf has issued a statement in response.
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Know Any Oregon-Based Writers?
Portland-based Literary Arts is offering a total of $59,000 in Fellowships and Book Awards this year for Oregon-based writers and their published works. Past prize recipients have included Wild author Cheryl Strayed, as well as Patrick deWitt for his novel, The Sisters Brothers (which our own Mark O’Connell raved about).