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
How to Win a National Magazine Award
Medium spells out how to win a National Magazine Award. Your article should be over 6,500 words. (It also helps if you are a man.) Deena Drewis writes about sexism in our categorizations of women’s writing.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Ronson; Hunter; Daum; Gruen; Shafak; Boyle
Out this week: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson; The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter; Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, edited by Meghan Daum; At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen; The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak; and The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
Titanic Fixes
Neil deGrasse Tyson just continues to fix the world, one piece of astronomical minutiae at a time. Theatergoers sitting through screenings of Titanic 3-D will no longer see an incorrect star field thanks to a “snarky” email sent by Dr. Tyson to director James Cameron.
Fine By Themselves
Was Virginia Woolf right that the Brontës were too isolated? Or were they just as housebound as their art required them to be? In the latest Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz examines the lives of the family, teasing out evidence that they all used loneliness to their benefit.
●
●
Good/Bad Franzen
Get to know the ins and outs of bookstore reading etiquette with this helpful guide (featuring none other than Jonathan Franzen) illustrated by Kate Gavino. Gavino, whose book Last Night’s Reading: Illustrated Encounters with Extraordinary Authors is out now, got her start with a wildly successful Tumblr account.
Every Word of The Great Gatsby…On Stage
In this week’s New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about the 8-hour staging of the full text of The Great Gatsby – “Gatz” – at the Public Theater. She and actor Scott Shepherd discuss it on a podcast.
●
●
The Women Warriors
“As I read her words, I experienced a feeling previously unknown to me: recognition. I had always turned to books for pleasure, as portals to other places. Reading The Woman Warrior, for the first time I saw myself on every page and in every word.” For Catapult, Alexis Cheung writes about representation, being an Asian-American writer, and reading and interviewing Maxine Hong Kingston. From our archives: Kingston’s work was featured in Alexander Chee‘s 2015 Year in Reading.
Intrinsic Flaws
Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson announced his intention to film Inherent Vice, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing over whether it’s even possible to adapt a Thomas Pynchon book for the screen. Now that it’s out, Geoffrey O’Brien investigates how faithful the movie is to the book, and whether or not that’s a good thing. Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s review of the book when it came out.
●
●