Out this week: Catapult by Emily Fridlund; Ferocity by Nicola Lagioia; The Power by Naomi Alderman; Crimes of the Father by Thomas Keneally; A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid; The Unstill Ones by Miller Oberman; The Secret Life by Andrew O’Hagan; and Devotions by Mary Oliver. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Fridlund; Lagioia; Alderman; Keneally; Reid; Oberman; O’Hagan; Oliver
Curated Book Lists
New York City’s iconic Strand bookstore features prominent authors’ curated book collections on their website. Here’s Jennifer Egan‘s. Here’s Art Spiegelman‘s.
That Old Imperial Impulse
“The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of ‘imaginative power,’ and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.” Jonathan Sturgeon in The Baffler on American exceptionalism and “the imperial self” in fiction, with particular attention paid to the work of two other Jonathans, Franzen and Safran Foer.
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The Final Rounds of the ToB
Another week of literary contests has whittled the Tournament of Books field down to four: Freedom, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Next, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Today, the team offers more analysis, previewing and recapping. Up next: the semis, the Zombie round, and the grand finale.
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The Ambitions of Oscar Wilde
“I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.” –Oscar Wilde on rejecting a career as a classics scholar. (via Book Bench)
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Picture of Alienation
In 2006, Gene Luen Yang became the first graphic novelist to be nominated for a National Book Award. Yang earned a nomination in the Young People’s Literature category for the graphic novel American Born Chinese. Now Yang has been nominated a second time, again in the Young People’s Literature category, for a new book, Boxers and Saints. Francoise Mouly and Mina Kaneko talk with Yang at Page-Turner. (You can also read our interview.)