New this week: The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil; The Burned Bridges of Ward, Nebraska by Eileen Curtright; Shock by Shock by Dean Young; The Selected Poems of Donald Hall; and On Cats by Charles Bukowski. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Tuil; Curtright; Young; Hall; Bukowski
“You were trapped to begin with”
“The Being and Nothingness Network: Social Media for Existentialists.”
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Selfie Sadism
Did David Foster Wallace predict our anxiety over selfies? At The Wire, Danielle Wiener-Bronner argues that Wallace was prescient in Infinite Jest. Although videophony, his concept of video-chatting, isn’t the same thing as a selfie, the paranoia over looking good is strikingly current. “This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen.”
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“This is my song, for real / Do doubt.”
Andrew Marantz reviews R. Kelly’s “breezy” and “revealing” memoir, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, for The New Yorker’s book blog, Page-Turner. This might be what they meant when they said they were “rebooting” the Book Bench. (Related: hear Gary Oldman read some passages from the book.)
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A Drive in the Woods
Before he graduated college in 2005, Ken Ilgunas began to worry about his mounting college debt. As a novel way of dealing with it, he moved into a van, a decision he chronicles in a new, extremely well-titled book, Walden on Wheels.
Grammar Wars
“Now, I wear the bloody ink of your beloved red, revisionary pens like warpaint across my cheeks.” Ethan Scofield writes an open letter to Grammar Nazis. Strunk and White, Grammar Police, would be appalled.
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