Marlon James, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize, believes that writers of color are “pandering to the white woman.” James touched on some related topics in the conversation with novelist Jeanette Winterson that we told you about yesterday.
Private Ennui
Tuesday New Release Day: Murphy, Scocca, Schulman, Whitehouse
New this week: Yannick Murphy's latest novel The Call is out this week, as is Tom Scocca's chronicle of expat life, Beijing Welcomes You (Both are written up in our big second-half preview). Also arriving is a new novel from Helen Schulman, This Beautiful Life, and Bed, the debut effort of David Whitehouse, which has already been a (minor) prizewinner in the UK, and which the publisher compares to A Confederacy of Dunces.
Fifty Shades of Regret
"Shouldn't we all feel a little embarrassed about the fuss we made over 50 Shades of Grey?" Jessa Crispin writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about E.L. James' trilogy and some of the longer responses, including Hard-Core Romance, which we briefly covered a few months ago.
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Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn; Dyer; Nelson; Lane; O’Donnell; Zeh; Tolkien
Out this week: Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn; Another Great Day at Sea by Year in Reading alum Geoff Dyer; Funny Once by Antonya Nelson; Black Lake by Johanna Lane; Closed Doors by Lisa O’Donnell; Decompression by the German writer Juli Zeh; and J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf, published now for the first time. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2014 Book Preview.
The Truth Is Here
Here's a piece of news you likely didn't see coming: David Duchovny has published a novel. Titled Holy Cow, it deals, in the words of interviewer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, with "a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism." She talks with the X-Files star in this week's Times Magazine.
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Close Call
After losing funding last spring, the Orange Prize has experienced a rebirth, gaining new financial backers and changing names; it will now be known as the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Two Moons, Two Reviews
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Charles Yu describes reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 as not so much reading it, but rather "liv[ing] with it for a while." I bet our own Kevin Hartnett would agree.
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