Out this week: City on Fire by our own Garth Risk Hallberg (whom we interviewed yesterday); Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann; Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel; The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts; Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam; And West is West by Ron Childress; and Eyes by William H. Gass. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hallberg; McCann; Michel; Roberts; Hickam; Childress; Gass
Drawing Autism
April is Autism Awareness Month, and a new paperback edition of Drawing Autism displays artwork created by artists all along the spectrum. You can take a look at some examples over here, and New Yorkers can hear from the book’s editor at the United Nations on April 2nd.
Form of the Future
“For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation.” Tor.com on why novellas are the form of the future.
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Sighs of Relief
There’s good news for all of us with embarrassing social media adolescences. After a 34-part, Pulitzer-nominated piece of investigative journalism disappeared from the internet earlier this year, it became clear that nothing on the internet is permanent. Also, don’t blame the internet for your unproductive day–that’s just you.
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The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.
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Tapping Away
Those of you who remember the days before the advent of the word processor likely have some fond memories of using (or seeing other people using) a typewriter. At The Guardian, the Books Blog collects typewriter stories from readers. You could also read our own Bill Morris on keeping a pen pal and using a typewriter.
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Marty the Monster
True Detective ended weeks ago, but someone once told me, “Time is a flat circle,” and that everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. And this piece on the show’s finale by Lili Loofbourow is going to be the best one you’ll read on the internet again and again and again forever. (Bonus: Our own Ujala Sehgal crafted a reading list based on one of the show’s [missing] elements.)
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