New this week: 4321 by Paul Auster; The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker; Mr. Iyer Goes to War by Ryan Lobo; The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld; and The Evenings by Gerard Reve. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Auster; Whitaker; Lobo; Appelfeld; Reve
N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. vs. R.I.P.
“I’m sure the ghost is fascinated by the N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. debate, and would add that there’s a literary-world bias… toward writing done by the living.” The New Yorker interviews Rebecca Curtis about ghost stories and her latest piece of short fiction, “The Pink House.” For more about Curtis, check out our review of her debut collection Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money.
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Time Magazine Goes Soft
Last week, a lot of people were disappointed by Time‘s decision to “water down” the latest issue’s cover for its American audience. As a follow-up, ShortFormBlog takes a look at the publication’s history of doing this, and also their reasoning.
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Quantum Invisibility Cloaks: For When Ordinary Invisibility Cloaks Won’t Cut It
This might come in handy if you’re trying to escape a bad review, or even avoid hanging out with your family. A team of physicists has developed a theory for “how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.” Take that, Harry Potter.
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Plagiarizing James Bond
Little, Brown & Company has pulled a mystery novel from the shelves after passages in the book were found to have been plagiarized from “a variety of classic and contemporary spy novels,” like James Bond novels and books by Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry.
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