Out this week: The King Is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón; In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende; The Kites by Romain Gary; Blood Brothers by Deanne Stillman; The Art of Loading Brush by Wendell Berry; and a new edition of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s A Field Guide to the North American Family. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Alarcón; Allende; Gary; Stillman; Berry; Hallberg
Getting You Back on Your Feet
If you get bored on your daily commute, you might want to look at Derive, an app that generates random routes that give you new perspectives on your city. As The Common founder (and Millions contributor) Jennifer Acker puts it: “Let the French show you how to walk.”
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Dostoevsky’s Fall from Grace
How long did it take Dostoevsky to go from being heralded as the “heir of Gogol” to being denounced as a “bad joke”? 15 days. Apparently he never recovered.
Smiles to tears
Writers of facial stage direction, beware: it is not actually the epitome of irony that smiling and crying can seem so oddly similar. At Aeon, Princeton professor Michael Graziono argues that the seemingly opposite gestures may just share evolutionary origins. (Pair with: Darwinist theories about “the evolution of the novel.”)
Mass-Market Edition is Dead
Harper Lee’s estate will no longer allow publication of the mass-market paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was popular with schools. Over at The New Republic, Alex Shephard writes that “Without a mass-market option, schools will likely be forced to pay higher prices for bulk orders of the trade paperback edition—and given the perilous state of many school budgets, that could very easily lead to it being assigned in fewer schools.” For more about the author’s legacy, read Robert Rea’s Millions essay on his travels to her home.
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As the Cock Crows
It’s that time of year again – our good friends at The Morning News are back with their annual epic, the Tournament of Books! Head over to TMN now to read round 1, which pits award season favorite Lincoln in the Bardo against Samantha Schweblin‘s Fever Dream (and read our own review of George Saunders‘s much-lauded novel here).