Recommended Reading: A new story by Yuri Herrera for Granta Magazine, featuring “the prayer of the overheated-horndog”: “Oh please, oh please, oh please / May he, the drunken me / May he, the dumbfuck me / May he, the me who never ever ever knows where shit is / May / he have saved one / Just one / Lubricated or corrugated / Colored or flavored / Magnum or tight-fit / Oh please / Holy Saint of horndogs / Grant me just one condom.”
New Romance
Tuesday New Release Day: Oyeyemi; Mengestu; Grand; Hadley; Calhoun; Dillen
Year in Reading alum Helen Oyeyemi has a new novel on shelves this week, as does New Yorker 20 Under 40 honoree Dinaw Mengestu. Also out: Mount Terminus by David Grand; Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley; Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun and Beauty by Frederick Dillen.
Appearing Elsewhere
Park Slopers, I’ll be reading tonight at 7 p.m. at The Community Bookstore on 7th Avenue, with our former guest contributor Joshua Henkin and some other folks, in celebration of the long running literary magazine Glimmer Train. It would be lovely to see some familiar faces, or new ones.
Menswear and Books
Jason Diamond looks at why “books are in [such] abundant supply in the menswear world.”
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Jack White Gets Interviewed By Buzz Aldrin
Jack White is so impossibly cool that, when he asked Buzz Aldrin to be his interviewer in the latest issue of Interview magazine… the former astronaut obliged.
Literature Isn’t Publishing
“In re-organizing the priorities of book publishing—by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as a way to make great books possible rather than the point—indie presses aren’t just becoming the places where the best books are published; they’re already there.” Over at The Atlantic, Nathan Scott McNamara writes on why American publishing needs indie presses. For more of his writing, check out his essay on Denis Johnson for The Millions.
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The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
“Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that’s not right. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I’m your president.”
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On the Day Job
Infographic of the Week: Famous authors had day jobs, too. Check out this infographic from Adzuna to find out what J.M. Coetzee, George R.R. Martin, J. K. Rowling, and more did before (or while) they published novels. Our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about the struggle to balance a day job and a creative life.
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