Out this week: The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li; Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez; Running by Cara Hoffman; The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan; Last Day On Earth by Eric Puchner; and The World to Come by Jim Shepard. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Coetzee; Li; Enriquez; Hoffman; Hogan; Puchner; Shepard
Russian Lit Quiz
Pop quiz for all you fans of Russian literature: What’s the protagonist’s first name in Doctor Zhivago? Hint: It isn’t “Doctor.”
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Near-Mythical Depictions
“For Groff, it is not that there’s a clearly delineated line between the universal and the particular, but rather that they are nested like Russian dolls: every story of the particular is also an iteration of the universal.” This review of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies from 3:AM Magazine is great. Our interview with Groff from a few weeks ago makes a nice complementary read.
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Whitman Illuminated
Speaking of innovative publishing, Tin House released a new edition of Whitman‘s “Song of Myself” illustrated by Allen Crawford on May 16th. There’s a book trailer, and selected pages from the finished book can be seen here.
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The YA Diet
From Hunger Games‘s Katniss to Divergent‘s Tris, today’s YA heroines are confident, intelligent, powerful, and always skinny. At The Atlantic, Julianne Ross argues that this scrawny stereotype ends up belittling the heroines’ independence and strength. “Just as women are expected to be sexual but not slutty, pure but not prudish, heroines should be strong but not buff.”
Unearthing the Curtain
When you think of Shakespeare’s plays, you probably think of the Globe Theatre. Yet for more than twenty years before the Globe was opened, the Curtain Theatre was the first home to such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. Unfortunately the place was closed and disassembled in the 17th century, and the location was presumed lost. Fast forward 400 years, however, and a team of East London excavators have finally uncovered a few of its sections.
Fin
Shakespeare is required reading for the would-be literary scholar, yet with so many articles, books and monographs on the Bard in circulation, it might be time to ask: have English professors finally said all there is to say?
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Censorship in China
“We have documented cases of at least 47 writers and journalists currently imprisoned in China. The average sentence for a writer is eight years in prison, and some sentences are even harsher.” PEN American Writers send a letter to Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, in response to his visit to the U.S. We have a few pieces about censorship to pair with it.
Are Young Writers in Their Prime?
Sam Tanenhaus, musing about the New Yorker “young writers” list points out that, far from being a writer’s formative years, many of the great classics in literary history were penned by writers in their 30s, or younger.