Out this week: Barkskins by Annie Proulx; Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel; I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro; The Course of Love by Alain de Botton; and The Girls by Emma Cline (which we reviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Proulx; Ausubel; Notaro; de Botton; Cline
Submergence Coming to a Theater Soon?
U.S. film producers have acquired the movie option rights for J. M Ledgard’s Submergence, a book Kathryn Schulz called a “strange, intelligent, gorgeously written book” – among the best she read all of last year.
Do Yourself A Favor
“I remembered Def Leppard for their one-armed drummer arrested for spousal abuse. Meanwhile Prince played, like, twenty different instruments while having sex in the backseat of taxicabs, ducking the Antichrist, and shouting for gun control. Also: girlfriend on drums. What’s fair is fair.” The Prince-related thinkpieces have mostly subsided by now, but this new piece by Dave Tompkins at The Paris Review will make you glad that people are continuing to write about him.
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“Any given moment”
In mid-January, ten days after moving to California, Geoff Dyer suffered a stroke while throwing away trash in his new home. At the hospital, he recovered quickly, but the incident left him “conscious that the ground could open Adairishly beneath my feet at any moment.” In the LRB, he writes about the experience. (Related: Dyer wrote two Year in Reading entries for The Millions.)
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Celebrating, Not Sanitizing, Complicated Women Writers
“Somehow, in my eagerness to honor these words, I’d tamed the political intentions behind their meaning. I’d reduced my icon’s truths into affirmational pick-me-ups rather than letting them sink deeper.” Dianca Potts reflects on how to best to appreciate the fullness of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison. We need to resist erasing their complexities in our haste to embrace them as icons or reduce them to inspirational quotes.
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Triple Threat
It’s either ironic or perfectly apropos that on the day the royal baby was born, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie teamed up for a rare joint reading.
L’Affaire Martel
In the HuffPo, the proprietors of San Francisco’s Booksmith defend Yann Martel‘s Beatrice and Virgil…sort of. I feel like I’m having Kindly Ones déja vü.