Recommended Reading: On new posters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and space travel’s place in storytelling. Dominic Smith asks why there aren’t more stories in space.
Stories in Space
Tuesday New Releases
David Remnick's biography of President Obama, The Bridge is out. (The Times explained how Remnick finds time to run the New Yorker and write a 700-page biography of a sitting president.) Also new: Another chronicle of the collapse, The End of Wall Street by talented financial journalist Roger Lowenstein; Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's "blog book" The Notebook; another in the posthumously published oeuvre of Irène Némirovsky, Dimanche and Other Stories; the latest from A.L. Kennedy, What Becomes; and Tom Rachman's touted debut The Imperfectionists.
Prime Minister, Poet
A rare manuscript dealer has put up for auction a 10 stanza poem written (in crayon!) by Winston Churchill. The poem, entitled “Our Modern Watchwords,” is believed to be the only known poem written by the British prime minister in his adulthood.
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“On the Internet, no one has stationery”
Back in July, Patricia Lockwood lit up the Internet with “Rape Joke,” a harrowing poem. Now, at The Rumpus, Lauren O’Neal interviews Lockwood, who talks about “Rape Joke,” the subsequent reaction and her 2012 book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. You could also read Elisa Gabbert on Lockwood’s Twitter followers.
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Whitman on Poe
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” - Walt Whitman on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance, circa 1880.
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Gold in the New Millennium
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower tracks the Klondike's modern gold rush in his typically comprehensive way.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Lethem, Rush, Dixon, Vann, McDermott, Harding
Out this week: a new novel, Dissident Gardens, by Year in Reading alum Jonathan Lethem; Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush; His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon; Goat Mountain by Year in Reading alum David Vann; Someone by Alice McDermott; and Enon by Paul Harding, which Joseph M. Schuster wrote about for The Millions yesterday.
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The Desert Oracle Gives You the Desert
Pacific Standards profiles Ken Layne who quietly started the popular quarterly literary magazine, Desert Oracle for a town of 8,000 people. Now it has gained far more readers than that as it highlights works related to the American desert. "The reason that the Oracle works is that it's always trying to elicit that feeling, the awe and wonder that the desert reveals to you when you listen hard enough. Layne believes it's not an accident that religious awakenings, UFO sightings, walkabouts, and other revelations occur in the desert. It's a consequence of solitude, stark beauty, and the tenacious life that only the desert has."
Death and Dishonor
At Granta’s website, the novelist David McConnell explains his fascination with the “honor killing,” a hate crime targeted at gay men that inspired his latest book.