Out this week: Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; Void Star by Zachary Mason; Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard; Double Bind, edited by Robin Romm; Often I Am Happy by
Tuesday New Release Day: Thiong’o; Mason; Gerard; Romm; Grøndahl; Grant
Smuggling Ulysses
Ulysses: The one book that publishers (and Joyce himself) desperately wanted to be confiscated – all in an effort to confront censorship, of course. Mental Floss has the full story.
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Pre-Revolutionary Russia… In Living Color
Tsar Nicholas II commissioned Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky to document pre-revolutionary Russia. His color photographs taken between 1904 and 1916 are incredible.
Dispatch from Cuba
The May issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, featuring new speculative fiction from Cuba by Herson Tissert Pérez, Mylene Fernández Pintado, Ena Lucia Portela, and others.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Elkin; Febos; Cottom; Butler; Mehta; Buchanan; O’Connell
Out this week: Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin; Abandon Me by Melissa Febos; Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom; Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; No Other World by Rahul Mehta; Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan; and To Be a Machine by our own Mark O’Connell (who we interviewed recently). For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Canon Fodder
I know, I know – another piece about “the canon.” This one, however, is sure to elicit a response one way or another. A sampling: “There are few (arguably no) female poets writing in Chaucer’s time who rival Chaucer in wit, transgressiveness, texture, or psychological insight. The lack of equal opportunity was a tremendous injustice stemming from oppressive social norms, but we can’t reverse it by willing brilliant female wordsmiths into the past. Same goes for people of color in Wordsworth’s day, or openly queer people in Pope’s, or …”
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