Out this week: LaRose by Louise Erdrich; The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller; The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon; The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes; Allegheny Front by Matthew Neill Null; The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley; Just Life by Neil Abramson; and The Selected Letters of John Cage. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Erdrich; Müller; Haddon; Barnes; Null; Hurley; Abramson; Cage
Tuesday New Release Day
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan drops today. Our review. Also out recently are Walks With Men, a novella by Ann Beattie, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a novel from Aimee Bender. This week also sees the long-awaited posthumous publication of Henry Roth's An American Type. Another recent posthumous publication: Robert Walser's mysterious Microscripts.
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Rejecting Tidy Narratives
For Lenny, Lidia Yuknavitch talks about suffering, art, and her path to writing. “I believe in art the way other people believe in God,” she says. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on grief that births art.
Strike Back
"What women do in the books mentioned here doesn’t consist of survival so much as sabotage. They throw bricks and rocks and flaming bottles into the chinks of the masculine world machine, then pick up a gun and fire into the turning gears. If rape and other sexual violence, religious servitude, and the politically determined inaccessibility of contraception can be seen as acts of war, stories like these may not just be a means of escapism. In the mind’s eye, they might be weapons, to be picked up, opened, and deployed." At the Boston Review, Elizabeth Hand looks at women who fight back in fiction, from Gone Girl to Medea.
Dispatch from Brazil
Recommended Reading: Selections from the forthcoming Women Writing Brazil issue of PEN America’s Glossolalia.
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Thursday Story: Chris Womersley
The Begging the Question Question
Just what does it mean to "beg" a question, anyway? And did I just do it, or not? The Book Bench is on the case.
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Guinea Pig, Actual Pig
Recommended Reading: Maria Russo’s Times review of the new Dr. Seuss book. (If you haven't yet, go check out Michiko Kakutani's companion review-in-verse.
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