Out this week: The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano; The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai; Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua; Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin; Time Travel: A History by James Gleick; and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Modiano; Krasznahorkai; Hua; Franklin; Gleick; Springsteen
Adam Novy Interview
Adam Novy, author of The Avian Gospels, is interviewed by Brad Listi for Other People. Their conversation topics include Chicago, Jewishness, Medusa, and “the fear of getting squashed by the universe.”
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The Freedom of Limits
“Limits stop you from living a life without limits,” writes Augusten Burroughs. “Of course, this is only an illusion. What limits really do is give you an acceptable excuse to avoid doing something.” (He’s talking about life, not Oulipo.) The piece is excerpted from his recent book, This Is How.
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Hospital Hijinks
Recommended Reading: The first chapter from Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, “OH MY GOD.”
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Punch Back with Books
“If you have a story to tell the world, please consider improving your craft and seriously pursuing publication. Your voice matters; add it to the narrative.” A list of “bookish ways to fight the good fight” from BookRiot.
Camus’ Web
Have you ever wondered what Charlotte’s Web would be like if Albert Camus joined the farm creatures? Well, someone wrote it for you at McSweeney’s. Pair with our review of Camus’ American Journals.
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Tilting at Political Office
“He represents a failure of empiricism — an unreliability arising not from the absence of rationality, but from the stubborn complexity of perception. This, I would argue, is precisely how the 2016 election went down.” In an article for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aaron R. Hanlon argues that Cervantes’ classic provides the perfect framework for understanding contemporary America, concluding that “Don Quixote is such a player in US politics that he might as well run for office.” Our own C. Max Magee read Quixote not long after founding the site, deeming it “essential to all who wish to understand ‘the novel’ as a literary form.”
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“Pixel Dust”
“In the end, no special effects, dazzling displays, augmented realities, or multimodal cross-platform designs substitute for content. Scholarship, good scholarship, the work of a lifetime commitment to working in a field — mapping its references, arguments, scholars, sources, and terrain of discourse — has no substitute.” Johanna Drucker writes about both the importance and the inherent difficulty of scholarly publishing for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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