Out this week: M Train by Patti Smith; Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore; The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe; and Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Audrey Niffenegger. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Smith; Campbell; Moore; Brooks; Marra; Ōe; Niffeneger
And the NMA Winners Are…
The good souls at Longform.org have organized all of this year’s National Magazine Award winners.
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A Good Character Is Hard To Find
I’ve told you about The Atlantic’s By Heart series plenty of times before. This week brings us novelist Paul Lisicky taking a close look at how Flannery O’Connor’s “flawed” characters are the ones we find ourselves drawn to most.
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A Crook By Any Other Name
William Shakespeare: playwright, poet, and…potential tax evader. Turns out the Bard might not have been the nicest businessman.
Send In the Clowns
Coulrophobes take heed! You’re not scared of clowns because they’re inherently dark, or even because you caught a few minutes of Stephen King’s IT on television. In fact, you probably owe your fear of clowns to a fellow named Joseph Grimaldi, the “Homo erectus of clown evolution.” When this progenitor died in 1837, a young Charles Dickens “was charged with editing his memoirs.” The resulting portrait, relays Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, was what ultimately “water[ed] the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown.”
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American Public Libraries: A Visual History
Public libraries remain our country's greatest democratic institutions, but it took generations of work and social progress to get them to their current place as beacons to their communities.
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