The National Rifle Association is featuring a series of reimagined fairy tales on their website. The only difference? Way more guns. In the debut story, Hansel and Gretel don’t bemoan their lack of food since they had been taught from birth to hunt with guns for sustenance. No, it’s not yet April Fools’ Day.
Just Right
Tuesday New Release Day: Adichie, Knausgaard, Brown
New in fiction this week is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. The second volume of Karl Knausgaard's My Struggle hits American shores (read about Volume One). Oh yeah, and that Dan Brown guy has a book out.
Remembering Mankell
Recommended Reading: This Atlantic article on the life of Henning Mankell, author of the Kurt Wallander series. The author said, “When I write, I always try to reflect the reality we live in, a reality that is becoming rougher and more violent. This violence and its impact on people around it is what I try to reflect in Wallander. But reality always surpasses the poem.”
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Visual Stories
If you haven't seen Knopf art director Chip Kidd's humorous TED Talk yet, you should really get right on that. He makes a good "visual first impression," discusses the role of a book designer, the smell of an iPad, and does it all while wearing a "skanky mic."
“Me & Gin,” Comics
Recommended Reading (Comics Edition): Jordan Jeffries’s comic adaptation of Lindsay Hunter’s “Me & Gin” – which originally appeared in Barrelhouse.
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Timely Books?
"In publishing, we see this play out in a number of ways. Marginalized writers are told by white editors, we need your stories now more than ever, as if we have not always needed them urgently. We are told our experiences are timely, exotic, and trendy. We are told our stories are not authentic if our characters do not suffer, as if the only way to prove that we are human is to bleed." Natalia Sylvester on the erasure that comes when marginalized writers are constantly being told by the publishing industry and others that your book about your marginalized identity is 'timely'.
50th Anniversary of “Silent Spring”
The environmental movement is gearing up for 2012, with today being the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
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Best (and Worst) Book Trailers
Melville House announced its Moby Award winners the week for book trailers in a number of serious and silly categories. (Full disclosure: I was a judge)
Pablo Neruda’s Body to be Exhumed
In 2011 I wrote about a group of Chilean Communists who wished to exhume Pablo Neruda’s body. They alleged that Neruda was murdered. Now, two years later, a judge has ordered the corpse to be exhumed and autopsied in order to set the record straight.
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