“Mario purchased pickup trucks from which he removed panels and lights. The trick was packing the drugs in a part of the vehicle where the body wouldn’t lose its hollow sound when slapped.” These two sentences just got author Dan Slater‘s new book Wolf Boys banned from Texas prisons, inadvertently calling attention to Banned Books Week. Pair with two of our essays about controversial reads.
Apparently Too Real
Good Grief
With his depressive musings, Charlie Brown was the original Morrissey. At "This Charming Charlie" tumblr, Lauren LoPrete pairs The Smiths lyrics with Peanuts comics to hilarious effect.
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The Little Bookstore That Could
This independent bookstore in Alabama has a novel concept–selling only signed copies of books. Alabama Booksmith is just one of many independent bookstores looking for new ways to survive in the world. This Millions interview with Janet Geddis, the founder of Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga, is both hopeful and inspiring.
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The Character of Retreat
Part Into the Wild, part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing is the story of his two years spent in profound solitude in the Vermont wilderness. Called “torture” by prison rights activists and “a threat to mental stability” by psychologists, Axelrod’s decision to sequester himself from society was nothing if not extreme. Alexander Supertramp would be proud.
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.
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There Is No End
"In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write." On writing and tenacity.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Buckley; May; Vallgren; Miller
Out this week: The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley; Paradise City by Elizabeth May; The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren; and The Penguin Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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