Out this week: Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth; Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein; Lucky You by Erika Carter; An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey; The River of Kings by Taylor Brown; and More Alive and Less Lonely by Jonathan Lethem. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Unferth; Grodstein; Carter; Journey; Brown; Lethem
Cinderella, as Told by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit gives the classic and rather dated tale of Cinderella an empowered, nuanced update that examines cultural myths about measures of prosperity.
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Criminal Justice in America: A Failure
William Stuntz’s book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice investigates “how, over the past 50 years, our criminal justice system had been transformed into an unfair, amoral bureaucracy–one that had given up on the very idea of justice.” Its genesis is worth reading about. So, too, is this related article in the most recent edition of n+1, “Raise the Crime Rate.”
Is Literature Useful?
“Literature is the record we have of the conversation between those of us now alive on earth and everyone who’s come before and will come after, the cumulative repository of humanity’s knowledge, wonder, curiosity, passion, rage, grief and delight. It’s as useless as a spun-sugar snowflake and as practical as a Swiss Army knife.” Dana Stevens and Adam Kirsch discuss whether literature should be considered useful.
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The Banal, Unexceptional Recovering
“So much of recovery is a fight against exceptionalism—that necessary act of saying, What I’ve lived has been lived before, will be lived again, is nothing special but still holds meaning, still holds truth.” Chris Kraus interviews Leslie Jamison about recovery, memoir, and her forthcoming title, The Recovering, for The Paris Review. Pair with: our interview with Jamison.
United Slang of America
(Interactive) Infographic of the Week: Slate’s United Slang of America. Click each state to find out more about the state-specific slang. You could also read our own Michael Bourne’s piece on, like, why the word like is really cool!
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