Out this week: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks; And Yet by Christopher Hitchens; The Lost Garden by Ang Li; and a new edition of Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems by Walt Whitman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Sacks; Hitchens; Li; Whitman
Honesty Trumps Good Manners
“Our children, at least in this country, with no tales of war to tell; only music and clothes. Infuriating and a blessing for our parents, who had experienced the abyss staring back at them. I suppose their memories must have hung around their necks like stinking albatrosses, only for their children to turn out themselves to be an abyss gazing back at the next generation. Is it catching? Whose 1950s was I living?” This installment of Jenny Diski’s memoir from the London Review of Books is not to be missed.
Two-Step
You may have heard that War of the Encyclopaedists is one of those rare novels written by multiple authors. Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite worked together to write their debut. In The Guardian, our own Emily St. John Mandel takes a look.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Buntin; El Akkad; Arimah; Meidav; Watts; Bausch
Out this week: Marlena by Julie Buntin; American War by Omar El Akkad; What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah; Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav; No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts; and Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
●
●
War and Peace and the Gita
Recommended reading: The New York Review of Books reviews at Richard Davis‘s The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography and the way centuries of politics can alter our interpretations of religious texts.
Feather-Light Chime
In the spirit of yesterday’s noise/silence-conscious Curiosity, here’s a piece from Granta Magazine that offers us a sneak peek at Helen Oyeyemi’s writing playlist. Spoiler alert: Led Zeppelin didn’t make the cut.
●
●
Charles Dickens’s Mistress
All six of the forthcoming films previewed by The Week’s Kerensa Cadenas look outstanding, but of particular relevance to Millions readers is The Invisible Woman. The film, which is an adaptation of Claire Tomalin’s biography of the same name, follows the life of Ellen “Nelly” Ternan (Felicity Jones), an actress who met Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and became his secret mistress.
●
●