“This is how he justified what he did even as he knew what kind of parent he’d become, the kind that used to make him gag as recently as two months ago. The ones who blithely assumed their online friends were gluttons for punishment. Here’s my baby lying on his back! And here’s my baby also lying on his back! And how about this one: blurry baby on his back! Good God, the vanity of it all, the epic self-centeredness. He knew all this, and still he uploaded eleven pictures of Brian.” An excerpt of Victor LaValle’s new novel The Changeling. (You could also read our interview with the author from last year.)
The Parent Trap
A New Struggle
A new, annotated edition of Mein Kampf is slated for release sometime next week, and it’s already poised to be a bestseller in Germany. The edition, which aims to “unmask his false allegations, whitewashing and outright lies,” will debut at number 20 on the bestseller list after increased demand bumped the initial print run up to 15,000 copies.
Who Wrote the First Mystery Novel?
“Never mind whether the butler did it. Here’s a real mystery for you: Who wrote the first detective novel?” Paul Collins at the New York Times takes another look at the usual suspects.
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“QB or not QB”
Is Rick Reilly’s poem about Tim Tebow so terrible that it could’ve sent “a shockwave through time, producing reverberations before it ever happen[ed]?” Matt Ufford thinks so.
That Kinetic Feeling
A couple weeks ago, Darcey Steinke wrote an essay for The Millions in which she remembered her friendship with Barry Hannah. She went into detail about the freewheeling energy of his prose. Now, in a review of Steinke’s latest for Bookforum, Lisa Locascio writes about the author’s own talents. “Many authors bounce the sacred and profane against each another; Steinke blasts them together with the intensity of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC),” she writes.
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The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”