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
Brooklyn is Coming to Eat Your Children
The reach of literary Brooklyn grows ever larger, as local hub BookCourt mounts a $300,000 campaign to convert the “Bibliobarn,” 160 miles north in the Catskills, into a “bookshop, event space, and writers’ retreat.” Upstaters, lock up your house-cured salume and artisinally sharpened pencils!
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City on a Hill
As the lone mental hospital in The Magic Mountain referred to by its real name, the Hotel Schatzalp is a holy site for many Thomas Mann scholars and fans. At Page-Turner, Sally McGrane writes about the modern hotel, which employs a staff trained to deal with the occasional “literary fanatic.” (It also might be a good time to read Matthew Gallaway on Death in Venice.)
Lolita Covered
The contest to design a new cover for Lolita that we noted in August has named some winners.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Koch; Shin; Henríquez, Foulds, Walsh, O’Neill; Dybek
New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez; In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.
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“As a goal in life, you could do worse than ‘try to be kinder.'”
The Above Average team animated an adaptation of George Saunders’s Syracuse University commencement speech, “The Importance of Kindness.” (You can read the original over here.) The speech has since been expanded, and it was published this past week.
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