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
Tribute
“Once [Jenny] Diski did get going as a writer, she and [Doris] Lessing agreed to a kind of literary nonaggression pact: Lessing would not write about Diski if Diski would not write about Lessing. Even now, I sensed a note of anxiety in Diski’s attitude toward her current project. When I asked her if she had any titles in mind for the finished work, she said: ‘Gratitude.’ Or: ‘Ingratitude.’ I can’t decide which.’”
David Byrne Talks Music
David Byrne, Talking Heads frontman, sits down with Smithsonian Magazine’s Seth Colter Walls to discuss his life, musical tastes, and his latest book, How Music Works. You can also read an excerpt from the book over here. (Also, you know, just because I have to...)
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The Pioneer Detectives in San Francisco
The Pioneer Detectives is coming to San Francisco! Join author Konstantin Kakaes and Gelf Magazine editor David Goldenberg at The Knockout in the Mission, Tuesday, September 17 at 6.30.
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Barack’s Book Club
George Pelecanos is the latest worthy writer to get the Obama bump.
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On “Reading to Impress Yourself”
Rebecca Mead writes for The New Yorker about "The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself" and the false divide between books "we read because we want to and those we read because we have to."
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Gentleman Seeking a Lady in Glasses
Are you a guy with good taste in frames and fiction? Then come to the next I Like Your Glasses: Literary Speed Dating. CoverSpy and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe will be hosting the event on February 12 at the store. Tickets are $15 (including a free drink), but gents can get their tickets for $12 if they use the promotional code "QUEEQUEG." To see what you're in for, read our essay on attending the first I Like Your Glasses.
The Applicant
"'Poetry, I feel," said Sylvia Plath in a radio interview in 1962, the year before her suicide, 'is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you've got to burn away all the peripherals.'" Fifty years after her death, an argument for close reading.