“The demagogic spirit of the ‘radio priest’ Father Charles Coughlin and the ‘minister of hate’ Gerald L.K. Smith has been reborn in the candidacy of Donald Trump, just as the exhortations of the Louisiana boss and rabble-rouser Huey Long, who declared war on ‘the superrich’ and proposed a ‘Share Our Wealth Society,’ all but predicted Bernie Sanders’s attack on ‘the billionaire class.'” Examining what political books can tell us about the election season with Sam Tanenhaus at The New York Times.
Populist Is Popular
“Madness and Meaning”
From Nebuchadnezzar to Hippocrates to the Victorian asylum: The Paris Review takes a look at mental illness and its treatments across the centuries.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sorokin, Perec, O’Nan
Out this week is Russian author Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik. Coinciding with that release, NYRB Classics is putting out Sorokin's Ice Trilogy. Georges Perec's The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is now on shelves, as is Stewart O'Nan's Emily, Alone, in which he revisits the Maxwell family from his 2002 book Wish You Were Here.
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Fate and Fiction
Recommended reading: Catherine Lacey writes for Granta about "The Question of Fate" and fiction writing.
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British Writers On Lady Chatterley’s Lover
At the Telegraph, Roya Nikkhah looks back at the unpublished letters of some of Britain's greatest writers that reveal what they really thought of the controversial Lady Chatterley's Lover.
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Sit Down, Stephen Fry.
Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian: Stephen Fry gives stand-up comedy a go at the Royal Albert Hall but doesn't quite have the punchlines for it.
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The Gone Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train
Someone's finally done it, and it's our own Emily St. John Mandel, to boot: over at FiveThirtyEight, Mandel crunches the numbers on books with the word "girl" in the title, concluding that we may not have reached peak girl yet. (Also 65% of the time, the girl in question is actually a woman.) Nonetheless, if you're looking to go rogue, check out our guide about how to title every book you ever write.