The good people over at The Rumpus have added another fantastic essay to their Albums of Our Lives series. This week, it’s Jonathan Kime who gives The Cure’s crushing, overwhelmingly melancholic 1989 album Disintegration the track-by-track treatment. Earlier iterations included Sufjan Stevens and Jason Isbell.
Pictures of You(th)
Tuesday New Release Day
Happy Freedom Day: The work at the center of all the reviews, magazine covers, and even, of course, controversy, has arrived. Jonathan Franzen's long-awaited novel Freedom hits shelves today. Our review. Also out today is Booker longlister Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Another newly translated Roberto Bolaño is out, The Insufferable Gaucho. As is You Were Wrong by Jamestown author Matthew Sharpe. Finally, fashion fans will dig vintage Japanese prepster handbook Take Ivy.
●
●
In This Here Place
"In this here place, we flesh; … Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it." Toni Morrison's Beloved as featured in a powerful essay by Allyson Hobbs for The Root about black life, Philando Castile, "and the trauma that remains." See also: a consideration of parallels between Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic and The Odyssey.
●
●
Reasons to Remember Her Name
At Slate, William Brennan looks at the oeuvre of Shirley Jackson, whose posthumous 1968 collection, Come Along With Me, got reissued recently by Penguin.
●
●
The Left Coast On Lefties
Southpaws unite! The LA Review of Books takes on left-handedness. Now, someone use this can opener for me.
●
●
Ever Thus
Recommended Reading: Gary Krist on the friendship-gone-wrong of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
●
●