Out this week: Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami; The Purple Swamp Hen by Penelope Lively; Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane; House of Names by Colm Toibin; and Woman No. 17 by our own Edan Lepucki. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami; Lively; Lehane; Toibin; Lepucki
Valleyspeak
Curious to know what the new Most Irritating Word is? Not many people agree on the number one offender, but for a while a top choice was “literally,” which evolved so much over the past few decades that the Oxford English Dictionary revised its official definition. At Slate, Katy Waldman proposed that we give the title to “amazeballs.” Now, in The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz makes the case for “disruptive,” the scourge of the tech world.
David Rees’s New Television Show
Get Your War On creator and How to Sharpen Pencils author David Rees was recently interviewed about his new show on the National Geographic channel. The premise behind the new venture is simple: “anything in the world that seems like there’s nothing to learn about, that’s what we want to learn about.”
Whither the Footy?
Apart from the fact that Anglo-Indian slang is an interesting topic in its own right, you should read this article simply to reward the writer for this lede: “Pyjamas did not exist until the 19th century.”
On (Not) Being a Woman Writer
Lio Min on being an "Asian American woman" who writes about "Asian American women's issues"—and then no longer fitting into one of those identities.
●
●
●
Not as Scary as Meeting Norman Mailer
Readers of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature most likely have a good idea of just how much the late Norman Mailer was a wellspring of jokes about writers. The pugilistic novelist, journalist and failed mayoral candidate did choose to title a collection of his work Advertisements for Myself, after all. Yet as Andrew O’Hagan notes in the LRB, it’s hard not to admire the cojones on a guy who once told a prominent editor he was “still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.”
●
●