“[Don] DeLillo’s characters long to penetrate the enigmas and intrigues of his conjured worlds; DeLillo’s readers devour his sentences, images and narratives for what amounts to something similar: for all that DeLillo — the seeker, the prophet, the mystic, the guide — sees.” Don DeLillo has a new book, Zero K, out tomorrow. Go check out this review from The New York Times, and then go take a look at this essay from The Millions’s own Nick Ripatrazone on DeLillo and American athletics.
Born Without Choosing
“I’d grown up watching and playing baseball.”
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Japan’s “National Disease”
It’s hard to believe that the country containing Aokigahara, or “The Suicide Forest”, has for so long ignored its abundance of clinically depressed, “overworked” citizens, but Junko Kitanaka, in her book Depression in Japan, explains exactly why that’s happened.
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It’s just not the same, is it?
Don’t like the idea of reading e-books to your kids? Turns out you’re not alone — a new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor says (pdf) that seventy percent of parents who own iPads prefer to use print books when reading to their children. If you read these articles, you might have seen this coming.
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A Review in Comics
Book reviews are great and all, but even we sometimes feel they’re missing something. Enter Kevin Thomas, whose HORN! illustrated reviews for The Rumpus are beautiful and informative in under 9 panels. Compare his pieces on Roxane Gay‘s An Untamed State or Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams to our reviews here and here, and be sure to check out the just-published HORN! The Collected Reviews.
Manuscript Shopping
A new Dr. Seuss manuscript has been discovered “stuffed in a 1962 issue of TV Guide.” Ruben Bolling (of Tom the Dancing Bug) has What Pie Should I Buy?, a story based on the author’s shopping list, at Boing Boing.
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N+2.0?
N+1 takes the brave step of making all more of its content available online, at a snazzily updated website. You might start with Mark McGurl‘s knockout piece on Zombie novels, a fitting companion to our own Emily W.’s recent work on vampires. Remember, though: subscribing “is the right thing to do.”
Let’s Relive the Election Through Books
The 2016 election will never truly end, at least not in the literary world. Buzzfeed noted that “a series of recent campaign books have enjoyed monster debuts, demonstrating a voracious reader appetite for behind-the-scenes looks at one of the most surprising elections in history”. And before you think this trend will end any time soon, Buzzfeed lists some up and coming titles that will be published later this year or sometime next year. “The success of campaign books come during a tough period for the publishing world, where industry sources have described the difficulty of getting authors on television or attracting media attention in a frenzied environment focused on Trump.” We’re all about the publishing industry doing well but this seems like a slightly unhealthy obsession for both readers and publishers.
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