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
Innovations in Multi-Tasking
The “Laptop Steering Wheel Desk” seems like a really bad idea. Then again, better that anyone inclined to use a computer while driving have a desk to put it on.
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Wells Tower on Your TV Screen
Talk about burying the lede. This article about Alec Baldwin’s return to television acting, and how he’ll be playing “a Rob Ford-type mayor of New York,” doesn’t make a big deal out of the show’s pilot writer. But it should. Because his name is Wells Tower.
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Say It Loud
At Longform, you can find a nifty old essay, originally published in 1990 in The Missouri Review, in which Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace pay a visit to a pioneering rap studio.
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“you have not thought thru clearly”
Recommended Reading (Inauguration Day edition): “Haecceity” by Joshua Clover.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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The Art of Fear
At some point, Machiavelli became Machiavellian, which is to say that his personal views evolved into the self-centered credo we recognize. At Salon, an excerpt of a new biography of the writer, which digs up the formative events of his early life.
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Social Media Existence Precedes Essence
Over at McSweeney’s, Sarah Solomon has undertaken the Sisyphean task of bringing existentialism into the twenty-first century. In a series of brief vignettes, Solomon gives the oft-maligned Millennial generation the existentialist makeover they never asked for. Continue your study of the absolute indifference of the universe with this essay by Zach Pontz on The Meursault Investigation, a new novel by Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud that imagines Albert Camus’s famous The Stranger from the perspective of the unnamed Arab antagonists.
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