For its November issue, Wired asks guest editor President Obama for a list of his 10 essential books. The magazine estimates that reading all of them, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Katherine Boo‘s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, will take only eighty-nine hours.
POTUS Picks
The Year of Incendiary Writing
Caitlin Flanagan’s long Atlantic piece on Joan Didion has sparked a lot of conversation. Among the article’s contentious lines: “to really love Joan Didion … you have to be female.”
Wardrobe A-Z
No idea what to wear to your next reading? Need to know the best sock pattern to wear while discussing magical realism? Want to coordinate your nail polish to your Amazon ranking? Buzzfeed’s here to help with this “Illustrated A-Z Guide to Author Wardrobe Staples.”
Poetry After the Windfall
The Chicago Tribune looks at Poetry magazine ten years after the tiny publication received an astonishing $200 million donation. How’s the magazine doing? “The answer is complicated.”
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We Can’t Wait to Compare It to Its British Version
Every now and again, book designers allow themselves a little fun. This is one of those times. Behold David High’s cheeky cover for Florence Williams’ Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, out this May from W. W. Norton & Co. (via)
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Civil War Lit Reconsidered
While there may not be any great literature from the Civil War period about the war itself, the war did leave an indelible mark on some of the great American writers toiling at the time. Craig Fehrman explores the topic at The Boston Globe.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Kunzru, Harrison, Krasznahorkai, Levin, de Botton, Haggadah
It’s a bumper crop of new books this week: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men, Kathryn Harrison’s Enchantements, László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (reviewed here), and Adam Levin’s Hot Pink. Also out this week are Alain de Botton’s Religion for Athiests and Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander’s New American Haggadah.
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