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
Melancholy Maurice Sendak Speaks
Where the Wild Things Are author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, 82, wistfully reflects on age, love, and mortality in this interview, after a mural he painted in New York was restored and moved to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. (via @BookBench)
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A Slow Death
Gawker.com will end operations next week – and this time it’s for good. Over at the New Yorker, Jia Solentino writes about what made Gawker singular in the online world. “A lively, difficult brand of unevenness was inherent in Gawker’s work, and this still seems to confound people: Why, if it took its work seriously, would it run 'some of both the best and worst of 21st century journalism,'” as Salon put it, and all under the same name?”
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A Writer Away
"War veterans experience something called hypervigilance, a mental state of continual alertness for danger. I have a minor version of this, a writer’s version. For me, danger lies in the sound of a footstep, a spoken word. Anyone could destroy the fragile construction I have to make each day." Roxana Robinson writes for VQR about the writer's need for solitude. For more from Robinson, be sure to check out her essay for The Millions on Edith Wharton.
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U.S. History Textbooks or J.K. Rowling’s Magic
Over at Indian Country Today Media Network, read a statement in response to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America. “What matters here, folks, in this debate over J.K. Rowling’s latest work is the language society uses – the language that is still taught to kids in schools today about Native Americans and our spiritualities.”
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Where You From?
Last semester, at UC Riverside, the novelist Susan Straight began the class “Mixed-Race Literature and the American Experience” with a simple question: “How many of you are often asked, What are you?” In an essay about the class, she relates what they learned, which includes the observation that hair is weirdly important in America. (Related: The Millions published an essay by Straight on Toni Morrison's Sula.)
Trump the Truth
"It is not normal for the President of the United States to refuse to offer even passing respect to the idea that telling the truth matters. It is not normal for the President to pretend that any news coverage he dislikes is 'fake news' that has been fabricated by the reporters who made up the story as well as their sources."Because this is where we are, PEN America has issued Trump the Truth, a report on free expression during the President's first 100 days. And in case you missed it, you must read our own Adam Boretz's review of Mark Lamont Hill's Nobody.
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A Beautiful Alternate World
Kaveh Akbar interviews poet Wendy Xu about oppressive syntax, imaginary realms, and poems as ecosystems. As she puts it, “Poetry validates the emotional realness of the imaginary.” Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
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