Out this week: Alice & Oliver by Charles Bock; Our Young Man by Edmund White; Now and Again by Charlotte Rogan; Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings by Stephen O’Connor; and The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Bock; White; Rogan; O’Connor; Tempest
The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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Graveless Dolls
Still working on your costume for Halloween this year? Check out these recommendations from Electric Literature for some hilarious costumes based on some really great short stories.
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William S. Burroughs Films
In case you’re looking for something to read this Sunday, check out seven William S. Burroughs films and interviews.
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Boy Geniuses
A snarky take on Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze‘s Wild Things and a positively damning view of Wes Anderson‘s behavior during the filming of his forthcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, all available at Gawker.
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Problem Solving
Bo Bartlett’s Winter Digs
“Romatic realist” painter Bo Bartlett, born in Columbus, Georgia, is renowned for his epic tableaus depicting a “Hopper-like sense of longing and mystery combined with a Lynchian-cocktail of menace, beauty, and stranger-than-fiction reality.” He was also a protégé and life-long friend of Andrew Wyeth. In Oxford American‘s most recent SoLost installment, the crew checks out Bartlett’s surprising and endearing winter workspace.
Silvertongued Wilson
Though Mark Twain first gained notoriety after publishing an essay about a famous jumping frog, the onetime Samuel Clemens didn’t really hit his stride until he became a public speaker, as the money he accrued from reading in front of audiences gave him a steady source of income. At Salon, Ben Tarnoff recounts Twain’s journey to the podium, one laid out more broadly in Tarnoff’s book about a group of San Francisco writers.