Tuesday New Release Day; Harrison; Jackson; Gioia; Barrett; Reeves; Ng

Guernica interviews Alice Walker in honor of Banned Books Week.

Thanks to recent advancements in digital scanning technology, it looks like the Herculaneum scrolls will be made legible after some two thousand years. The new technique allows for close study of the scrolls without causing irreparable damage to the papyrus via exposure to the moisture in the air, an issue which had dogged scholars for centuries. If the impermanence and tenuousness of writing is more your speed, here’s a bit on Twitter, instead.

Those of you with some knowledge of Pale Fire and Lolita won’t be surprised to learn what Nabokov thought of dinner parties. Namely, he thought they were awful, vaguely surreal events, held largely by drunkards with overriding appetites for drama. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein quotes a passage from “The Vane Sisters” to explain why “It’s hard to think of someone you’d want less at a midcentury faculty tea, save maybe a seething Shirley Jackson.” You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. 

Congratulations to Millions staffer Edan Lepucki, who sold her debut novel California to Little, Brown at auction this week. The novel, which Edan refers to as “Novel #2” in her article “What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell,” will follow a young married couple grappling with a post-apocalyptic world. Consider us extra relieved given Edan’s proclamation in that article: “And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.”

Recommended Reading: Michael J. Avogino‘s “Total Utter Madness: A Story of Soccer” from the Tin House archives.  If you’re going to watch soccer all day, might as well throw some good writing in there too, right? An example: “Life would go on, as would the sport of soccer and all that came with it: the broth­erhood, the ethnocentricity, the sports­manship, the nationalism, the love, the regionalism, the racism, class conflict, the sublime, the nonsensical, amongst white, black, brown, Protestant, Catholic, Mus­lim, Jew, everyone guilty and innocent.”

When Steven Millhauser calls your work “astonishing,” it’s safe to say you’ve done a pretty good job. Here is book designer Janet Hansen at The Literary Hub on falling in love with a book and taking a risk with its design.