Recommended Reading: On Brad Bigelow, a “Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Our own Claire Cameron traces the history of John Williams’s Stoner, which was first published in 1965 and became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013.
Custodian of Forgotten Books
Basta
It’s rare that a writer decides his new novel will be his last, but that’s exactly what Michael Faber has done with regards to his latest, which comes out this week. In the Times, he talks with Alexandra Alter about his decision, saying: “I felt that I had one more book in me that could be special and sincere and extraordinary, and that that would be enough.” It’s probably a good time to read our own Bill Morris on the history of literary retirements.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Future, Foer, Food, Info, Boxing, Pym, Patterson, and More
My book, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is out today (more on that here), and also out this week is Joshua Foer's (the latest of the Foer's to throw his hat in the authorial ring) Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, buzzed about food memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a new look at the modern world's most ubiquitous commodity James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Library of America boxing anthology At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Mat Johnson's Poe-inspired Pym, and Victoria Patterson's This Vacant Paradise. New in Paperback: Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered.
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Book Collecting Bonanza
At Bookride, the top 20 sites for book collectors.
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Presidential Fan Mail
Jacket Copy gets some presidential fan mail. Plus, find out what said president has been reading lately.
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Obama’s Books
In support of "Small Business Saturday," President Obama took his daughters shopping for books at Kramerbooks in D.C. So, which books made it to the register?
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The Teen Whisperer
"When John Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, 'But it’s your plot, John!'—which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship." Green, author of YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, is the literary hero of teenage girls, and nerdfighter hero to millions. After you read the excellent profile at The New Yorker, consider the The Millions' own review.
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CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda's remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn't die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate's official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers' houses.