Out this week: Five-Carat Soul by James McBride; Unforgivable Love by Sophfronia Scott; Brother by David Chariandy; The Second Sister by Claire Kendal; and Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: McBride; Scott; Chariandy; Kendal; Erpenbeck
Know Your Book Covers
Think you know your Arthur Conan Doyle from your Agatha Christie? This week, The Guardian quizzes you on the book covers of classic crime novels. In case you missed it, previous weeks featured science fiction and literary classics.
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Writing For Your Life
“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
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Hotel Reviews Reviewed
Year in Reading Alum Alexander Chee reviews Rick Moody’s latest release, Hotels of North America. “The present is too cruel for him, and yet he cannot change it, so there is this instead, sentence by sentence, a nod to the past that is really a nod to his own past. A conflation of his nostalgia for the days of his sexual attractiveness and the unencumbered power of white men, all of it dressed up as a love for old words.” To hear more from Moody, check out our recent interview with him.
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On Not Reading
“There are writers we instinctively, permanently dislike: not only will we never read them, we will quietly relish the not-reading, finding in it a pleasure that can occasionally rival reading itself.” Dan Piepenbring explores the advantages of not reading for the The Paris Review. Pair with our own Sonya Chung’s essay on the art of not finishing books.
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Oh No, Computer
Radiohead can typically do no wrong in the eyes of fans and culture pundits, but author Ian Rankin describes how even these indie heroes got him stuck in customer service hell: ” no e-mail address; no phone line; no possibility of human contact.”
Against Capital Punishment
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Tuesday New Release Day: Messud, Ausubel, Hill, Sjón, Powers
New this week: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel, NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, and three newly translated books from by Icelandic author Sjón: The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, and From the Mouth of the Whale. New in paperback is The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.
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