New this week: A Hundred Thousand Words by Bob Proehl; Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner; The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro; The Bones of Grace by Tahmima Anam; The Swan Book by Alexis Wright; The Life of the World to Come by Dan Cluchey; and Mortal Trash by Kim Addonizio. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Proehl; Steiner; Shapiro; Anam; Wright; Cluchey; Addonizio
Reading Material
BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard
“I am so grateful for this tool in my writer’s toolkit. It has liberated both me and my texts from an overbearing approach to ‘getting it right.’” Cara Benson for the Amazon Author Insights blog (full disclosure: Amazon helps us pay the bills over here!) on the benefits of writing and revising by hand. And she’s not the only one who likes to go manual.
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Graffiti Lit
When street art and literature combine: on “The Moving, Playful Poetry of the World’s Textual Graffiti Artists,” from Slate.
Two Ways of Looking at Kapow!
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On Zadie Smith and Barack Obama
Electric Literature’s blog The Outlet begins a series of essays with the question: “Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?”
Is This the Apocalypse?
The day has come. Amazon just announced that it is now selling more e-books than physical books, and its ad-infused “Kindle with Special Offers is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family.” Meanwhile, it’s still news when a well-known author publishes an e-book (in this case, Susan Orlean’s new Kindle Single Animalish).
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Armageddon: The World’s Dream?
Over at Full Stop, Scott Cheshire mulls the concept of Armageddon, or, as he calls it, “The Other American Dream.” Meanwhile, a French photography team is traveling the world to take pictures of cities “without signs of life.” Perhaps the fascination isn’t so American after all.