Down with the “mocktail.” McSweeney’s has provided a helpful list of fun drinking games for non-drinkers. This Millions piece on eating and drinking and reading should help to whet your appetite.
Tiny Umbrellas and Baby Carrots
Incendiary Verse
Do you love poetry, but often wish you were monitored on more government watchlists? Well, now you can scratch both of those itches by purchasing Poetry of the Taliban, a new anthology endorsed by and published on the group’s website. Unsurprisingly, the book has garnered its share of criticism, but as Melville House’s Kelly Burdick notes, it also has a coalition of allies and proponents.
Editorial Notes
“Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy [Gordon] Lish calls ‘consecution,’ the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense.” At Full-Stop, Daniel Green examines the editor’s influence in a piece on Noy Holland’s new book.
Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, “I sighed.” We’re sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
●
●
Give the Gift of Dalkey
It’s that time of year again. Dalkey Archive’s annual holiday sale is upon us. Grab 10 books for $65, or 20 books for $120 — and that includes shipping!
Greatest Summer Reads
Still looking for summer book recommendations after checking our 2015 Second-Half Preview? We’re not sure we believe you, but here are fifty of the greatest summer reads as ranked by Flavorwire, just in case.
●
●
‘NCIS’ To Cease Print Edition
“Longtime readers are already mourning the end of an era as CBS announced today that at the end of this month it would cease print operations of the popular drama NCIS.”
●
●
Perfectly Inexplicable
Last week, I wrote about Kathryn Schulz’s innovative interview with David Mitchell, which took place on a walk along the Irish coastline. Now, in a nice complement to our own review from today, Pico Iyer reviews the author’s latest. Sample quote: “A perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can’t explain.” Our review of The Bone Clocks was published today.
●
●
Moment Four
Who better to review a new sci-fi book than Ursula Le Guin? The Guardian editors couldn’t think of a better candidate either. She reviewed the new story collection Three Moments of an Explosion by the English writer China Miéville. Sample quote: “Pastiche, when present, is so skilful that it can go unnoticed.” You could also read our own Bill Morris on discovering Miéville’s work.
●
●