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Tuesday New Releases – Dan Brown Edition
Booksellers across the country have loaded up dollies with towers of boxes and carted them to the front of the store. Amazon has broken into its super-secret, double-locked, chain-link fence. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is here. Understandably, other publishers have ceded this Tuesday almost entirely to the Dan Brown hype machine, but those looking for something (very) different can today find Joyce Carol Oates doing the zombie thing (not really) and the latest from Tao Lin.
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The President’s Summer
President Barack Obama shared his official summer reading list, featuring the likes of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
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Seventeen Years Later
“It is a darker book, I don’t deny that, but that’s the story that came to me and wanted to be told.” Seventeen years after Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy ended, the writer is releasing La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his new trilogy, The Book of Dust. Pullman also said the second volume of the trilogy of already complete, according to The Guardian. Check out our own Janet Potter on grief, books, and His Dark Materials.
Deeper into the “Twungle”
Margaret Atwood considers her experience of Twitter and describes how the wilderness of the online world is spilling over into her physical reality.
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Purgatorio
After more than sixty years, Antonio di Benedetto has had his book Zama finally translated into English. The novel, which kicks off in the 1790s, depicts a Spanish administrator named Don Diego de Zama, whose viceroy dispatches him to a town in the scrublands of Paraguay. In the latest New Yorker, Benjamin Kunkel gives his take.
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Sit Down, Stephen Fry.
Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian: Stephen Fry gives stand-up comedy a go at the Royal Albert Hall but doesn’t quite have the punchlines for it.
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The New Gay Novel
“Garth Greenwell’s project with What Belongs to You is to remind us how illicit cruising and anonymous sex figure within the modern gay identity. As the gay marriage movement helps sanitize (and de-sexualize) queerness, Greenwell brings the dark and sordid elements of sex and promiscuity back into sharp relief.” Over at Pacific Standard, Nathan Smith writes on the new gay novel. Pair with the Millions review of Greenwell’s book.
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