What’s going on in Hong Kong? Last week, a man by the name of Lee Bo became the fifth member of the Hong Kong-based publishing house Mighty Current, which specializes in provocative tomes about Beijing leaders, to vanish mysteriously. A few of those missing have been in sporadic communication with worried family members, letting them know in opaque terms that they are “helping with an investigation.”
Curious Case of the Missing Publishers
Maurice Sendak Dies
The New York Times is reporting that Maurice Sendak has died at 83. In part because I shared a name with its main character, Where the Wild Things Are was a beloved book of mine. Sendak’s last book Bumble-Ardy, full of chaotic drawings of mischievous pigs, is a favorite of 19-month-old son’s. May Sendak’s bountiful imagination and heart live on for many generations in his books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Adrian, Prose, Doyle, Boyd, Grant
It’s a big week for literary new releases. Chris Adrian’s much anticipated new novel The Great Night is now out, as is Francine Prose’s My New American Life. Also new this week are Roddy Doyle’s latest collection of stories, Bullfighting, and the reissue of William Boyd’s impish prank of a book, Nat Tate: An American Artist. Finally, past Booker shortlister Linda Grant has a new novel out called We Had It So Good.
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Shop Talk
There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.
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Don’t Read This When Hungry
Recommended Reading: Kevin Brockmeier’s essay “Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place” at The Georgia Review. “Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work.” For more Brockmeier, check out our review of his novel The Illumination.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ghosh; Murakami; Hoffman; Jackson; Miéville; Brelinski; Crucet; Celt
Out this week: Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh; Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami; The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman; Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson; Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville; The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski; Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jeanine Capo Crucet; and The Daughters by Adrienne Celt. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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The Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County
All of Faulkner’s characters exist in the same county, so they probably ran into each other. What if there were a Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County? Nathan Pensky humorously imagines the feuds between As I Lay Dying’s Addie Bundren and the protagonist of “A Rose for Emily” among others at McSweeney’s.
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