Out this week: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud; The Hidden Light of Northern Fires by Daren Wang; My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent; To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann; and All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Messud; Wang; Tallent; Rothmann; Handler
Keeping the Pace
"A story works when there’s momentum, life behind the words," Mary Miller told Matthew Salesses at The Rumpus. She needs that momentum for her new novel, The Last Days of California, about a family driving to California for the rapture. Also, Amy Butcher wrote about her favorite Millerisms at Hobart.
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Or Is this Just a Silly Comparison?
Could the reinvention of prolific food chronicler Ricky Rozay’s rap persona provide a guidebook for the recently exposed Jonah Lehrer? (h/t Ryan Chapman)
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Empirical Studies of the Class System
Following the recent passing of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, The New Statesman republished the author’s London diary, first published by the magazine back in 1958.
No More Nice Girls
n+1's Research Collective has posted the introduction to Ellen Willis's No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and plans to post a series of essays by the seamless activist and writer-- "Her refusal to subsume her personality to a movement, or to ignore the things that were important to her, remains an inspiration."
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“A Giant Empathy Machine”
"It may be true... that the internet will turn out to be 'a giant empathy machine.' And yet, as any reader knows, we’ve already had one for centuries." Drew Calvert reviews The Novel: A Biography for the Los Angeles Review of Books and provides an argument for the novel in the digital age.
Musical Theories
We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
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The Great American Male Novel
The New York Times recently asked Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid why there isn't a Great American Novel written by a woman? Both writers concluded that there is no such thing as the Great American Novel. "But if the idea of the Great American Novel is blinding us to exquisite fiction written by women, then perhaps its harm is exceeding its usefulness," Hamid wrote. We think that's a bit of a cop out. But a few women showed up on our list of the Greatest American Novels.
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