Out this week: Nutshell by Ian McEwan; Jerusalem by Alan Moore; Commonwealth by Ann Patchett; Black Wave by Michelle Tea; Umami by Laia Jufresa; Loner by Teddy Wayne; Little Nothing by Marisa Silver; Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello; Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb; This Vast Southern Empire by Matthew Karp; When in French by Lauren Collins; and Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: McEwan; Moore; Patchett; Tea; Jufresa; Wayne; Silver; Frangello; Gottlieb; Karp; Collins; Kleeman
Secret Space
Recommended Reading: Over at Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes about the importance of secrets for a child’s development and in children’s literature.
The litigation is never dead. It’s not even past.
Last Thursday, Faulkner Literary Rights, the company controlling William Faulkner’s works, proved two things by suing Sony Pictures Classics: 1) that they finally got around to seeing Midnight In Paris (2011); and 2) that they’re not down with Woody Allen’s decision to include two of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s lines in Owen Wilson’s dialogue.
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Writing through Dementia
Recommended Reading: Gerda Saunders’s essay “My Dementia: Telling who I am before I forget” on being a writer with dementia. “Looking back at the chapters I’ve completed, I ask myself, ‘How come I can still write? Could I be faking dementia?'”
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E-Books Upend Publishing Class
A Columbia University course that has taught generations of bright-eyed would-be Maxwell Perkins the ins and outs of the New York publishing biz has had to retool its curriculum to account for the e-book phenomenon, the New York Times reports.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Los Angeles-based Millions readers might be interested in Sunday night’s edition of Tongue and Groove at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. I’ll be reading, along with writers Cecil Castellucci, Michael O’Keefe, Frank Montesonti, and Giuliana Mayo. Show starts at 6 pm.
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Better Book Reviews
Darryl Campbell has had enough of the clichés abundant in book reviews so he’s devised some alternatives. “If fine artists aren’t your thing,” Campbell writes, “then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: ‘Taft-like excess,’ ‘Cleveland-esque genre-bending’ or ‘Clintonian eroticism’.”
52 Blue
Recommended reading: Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (which we covered here and here), writes again, this time about 52 Blue, “the loneliest whale in the world.” The full work is available at Atavist for $3.99, but an excerpt is available at Slate.