New this week: The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota; The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien; Chicago by Brian Doyle; The Destroyer in the Glass by Noah Warren; Dothead by Amit Majmudar; Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Millions contributor Buzz Poole; and New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 by Jay Parini. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Sahota; O’Brien; Doyle; Warren; Majmudar; Poole; Parini
The Work of a Good Woman
As our own Nick Moran reported two weeks ago, Alice Munro has decided to retire from writing. Herewith, a timely profile of the author, courtesy of the Times. (You could also read Ben Dolnick on her last book of stories, Dear Life.)
A Bit Rusty
Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this — who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prose pick greats that are no longer great.
●
●
Park Life
Coincident with the release of her new novel, Marie-Helene Bertino published an excerpt in the latest issue of Granta. It features, among other things, a character using the phrase “better-him-than-me kind of park.” You could also read Bertino’s interview with Jessica Gross, which followed the publication of her debut book of short stories.
●
●
Football Book Club: ‘The Case Against Satan’
It’s a brand new week and Football Book Club is reading Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan. For those of you scoring at home, that’s an exorcism novel written by a former executive editor of Playboy. Plus posts about Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth.
Passive Voice is for Missing Subject
“I wish all this telling women alcohol is dangerous was a manifestation of a country that loves babies so much it’s all over lead contamination from New Orleans to Baltimore to Flint and the lousy nitrate-contaminated water of Iowa and carcinogenic pesticides and the links between sugary junk food and juvenile diabetes and the need for universal access to healthcare and daycare and good and adequate food. You know it’s not. It’s just about hating on women. Hating on women requires narratives that make men vanish and make women magicians producing babies out of thin air and dissolute habits.” Rebecca Solnit on the passive voice, mysterious pregnancies, disappearing men, and the Center for Disease Control. Pair with this Millions review of Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby.
●
●