There was a lot going on this September. Luckily, the good folks over at The Literary Hub have provided us with this helpful list of five of the best new books September had to offer. A personal favorite includes Emily Donoghue’s The Wonder, in which the protagonist appears to be subsisting on nothing but water.
Slow Down, September!
Visible Men
Now is as good a time as there ever will be to go and check out the Art Institute of Chicago. A new exhibit, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” combines the photography of Parks, who eventually went on to gain a measure of fame in the ’70s as a Hollywood movie director, and the writing of Ralph Ellison, in an attempt to offer a portrait of Harlem in the post-World War II years.
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The Best Lincoln
The Morning Edition crew sifts through nearly 15,000 biographies of Abraham Lincoln in order to determine the best of the best. Janet Potter, you have your work cut out for you.
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The Chosen Ones
“The second prophecy was even more intense than the first one, and introduced a lot of new rules I didn’t even know existed, but everyone else seemed to kind of already know about them. But you know what? We’re a misfit band of teens who will do anything for each other now, like stand up to that town bully who’s not even scary to us anymore, now that we’ve faced pure evil and lived.” An excerpt of Mallory Ortberg’s best-selling YA novel.
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TQC Launches E-Book Series
The Quarterly Conversation is kicking off its new “Long Essays” e-book series with Lady Chatterley’s Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can’t Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can.
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Whitman on Poe
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” – Walt Whitman on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance, circa 1880.
Connected by “And” and “And”
New books of poetry from names like Linda Gregerson and James Tate are always a cause for celebration. Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson takes a look at Gregerson’s Prodigal: New and Selected Poems and Tate’s Dome of the Hidden Pavilion in one extremely thorough essay.
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Top Longreads of 2011
They say you’re only as good as the company you keep. If that’s the case, we’re thrilled to have published Jim Santel‘s piece on The Moviegoer, which has made The Awl staff’s list of “Top Longreads of 2011“.
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