“Calvin and Hobbes is certainly not a text about queerness, yet when I returned to it at this altered point in my life, the strip suddenly seemed to describe things that resonated with me now: what it was like to live in a world where expressing your realest self is so often penalized, and the value of finding a second family, a close friend or friends, if your blood family fails to understand or accept the truest version of you.” Gabrielle Bellot at The Literary Hub explains why Calvin and Hobbes is great literature.
Calvin!
Tuesday New Release Day: Strout; Jelloun; Chiarella; Ellis; Yapa; Miéville; Gurley; Berne; Black
New this week: My Name Is Lucy Barton by the Pulitzer laureate and Year in Reading alumna Elizabeth Strout; The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun; And Again by Jessica Chiarella; American Housewife by Helen Ellis; Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa; This Census-Taker by China Miéville; Eleanor by Jason Gurley; The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne; and Even the Dead by John Banville's alter-ego Benjamin Black. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Reading with the Jetsons
Ever dreamt of using a sophisticated library where robots fetch your books for you? Well, you bespectacled futurist, guess what. (h/t The Paris Review)
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Inferno (A Poet’s Recommendation)
Looking for some new poetry? Inferno author Eileen Myles pens a ringing endorsement of Erica Kaufman's Instant Classic. The book has "haunted and befuddled" her for over a year, she writes.
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*Cricket*
"It’s a book about fathers that has few good ones on display. It’s a book about language that cannot decide among many. It’s a book about bargains in which no character makes a wise one." On Aravind Adiga's new novel Selection Day.
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