“A good marriage is, I think, a very long conversation.” National Book Award finalist Lauren Groff discusses Fates and Furies at Lit Hub. We have an interview with the author to complement it.
A Very Long Conversation
Coda
Sad that Mad Men is over? We’ve got just the thing. Back in 2012, our own Hannah Gersen compiled a list of ten books to read when a given season — or, in this case, the series — comes to an end.
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Alias Atwood
Following on the success of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix teases a first trailer for its take on Alias Grace. Read our review of the former here.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Groff; Banville; DeWitt; Boyd; Tuck; Selznick; Bell; Luiselli
Out this week: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; The Blue Guitar by John Banville; Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt; Sweet Caress by William Boyd; The Double Life of Liliane by Lily Tuck; The Marvels by Brian Selznick; Scrapper by Matt Bell; and The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Swedish Covers
50 watts, a blog dedicated to book-related design and illustration, takes a look at Swedish book covers.
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The Inmates Have Taken Over
“Summer morning is risen / and to even it wends / and still I’m in prison / without any friends.” Start your Monday off right with this piece from The Paris Review on John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Speaking of the madhouse, here’s a piece on Anne Sexton and her book Transformations.
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“Sing About Me”
“Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts…When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
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Add Poems to Your Curriculum
Are you familiar with “Teach This Poem“? If not you should be. This organization just won the National Book Foundation’s 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize. Their literary social impact mission? Help teachers add poetry to their curriculum; “Each week, The Academy of American Poets emails out a poem along with interdisciplinary information — classroom discussion questions and multimedia offerings like maps, videos, photography, and related reading suggestions. Everything is curated to help teachers incorporate poetry into the classroom experience.” Find out more about the prize and the org here.
Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.