Out this week: My Struggle: Book Five by Karl Ove Knausgaard; Before the Wind by Jim Lynch; Hystopia by David Means; Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus; and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Knausgaard; Lynch; Means; MacManus; Sittenfeld
CSI Amsterdam
“We are not trying to point fingers or prosecute. I am just trying to solve the last case of my career. There is no statute of limitation on the truth.” A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed Anne Frank‘s hiding place to the Gestapo in 1944, reports The Guardian.
A Quality of Immortality
“When watching [Abbas] Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac.” Here’s something you don’t see every day — an essay that begins with an Independence Day showing of The Purge: Election Year, and somehow ends up at a poetic examination of Kiarostami’s artistic legacy.
Yes, Kate
Recommended (Revolutionary) Reading: On why Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics remains so relevant to today’s most heated literary arguments, despite its being nearly fifty years old at this point.
To the Moon and Back
David Seed looks back on more than two millennia of the moon in literature, from Galileo to Jules Verne to Johannes Kepler to Edgar Allan Poe.
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Hitchens on Mamet
It almost sounds too terrifying to be true. Your book is reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and he opens with: “This is an extraordinarily irritating book” (and it gets worse from there, and deservedly so). It happened to David Mamet and his new book The Secret Knowledge.
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“I don’t love women writers enough to teach them.”
Millions alumna Emily M. Keeler interviewed author David Gilmour for Hazlitt’s Shelf Esteem blog. In the process (and perhaps because he was distracted by “a Frenchman”) the author voiced some opinions on female authors that have been called “ill-informed,” “careless and offensive,” and “staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial.” The ongoing kerfuffle prompted Hazlitt to share the unedited transcript from Keeler’s interview, and it’s clear that Gilmour’s remarks were not taken out of context.
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