New this week: The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel; The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah; Youngblood by Matthew Gallagher; Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney; The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig; A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh; Don’t Lose Track by Jordannah Elizabeth; and The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee (who we interviewed this week). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Martel; Gappah; Gallagher; Pinckney; Zweig; Welsh; Elizabeth; Chee
The Texas of Africa
“Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.” The New York Times Book Review on the writer’s There Was A Country.
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“YA fiction has blossomed outside the literary world’s prestige economy.”
In response to an article in the Atlantic observing that women dominate the world of YA fiction, Laura Miller wonders whether men avoid and women embrace YA fiction for the same reason: it offers little prestige.
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The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
“Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that’s not right. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I’m your president.”
Walk, Don’t Run
Haruki Murakami retired his running shoes to walk to Kobe and rediscover his hometown. “Strictly speaking, it’s not my home town any more. I feel a deep sense of loss at this fact, as if the axis of my memories is faintly, but audibly, creaking within me. It’s a physical sensation,” he writes in an essay for Granta.
Neil Gaiman’s Video Game
Neil Gaiman announced the launch of his first video game, Wayward Manor. The horror-fantasy author (whose latest book was recently reviewed by our own Tess Malone) told Mashable that the game follows “the misadventures of a ghost who wants nothing more than a peaceful afterlife.”
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