Out this week: Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes; Shadowless by Hasan Ali Toptas; Start Without Me by Joshua Max Feldman; The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I; and Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: MacInnes; Toptas; Feldman; Plath; Hanks
Jean-Patrick Manchette Movie Adaptation on the Way
Idris Elba, Sean Penn and Javier Bardem have signed on to star in a film adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel, The Prone Gunman. According to Christian Blauvelt of Hollywood.com, “Elba will be playing a cloak-and-dagger agent named Dupont who tangles with Sean Penn, who also plays an agent for a clandestine operations outfit who is betrayed by his organization, forcing him on the run across Europe.”
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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Love Stories
“[Ludmilla] Petrushevskaya doesn’t write about isolated acts of depravity; she writes about universal ones,” says Michael Robbins in his review of There Once Lived a Girl. “What’s scary about her narratives is their implication that only the thinnest film, which might rip at any time, separates us from the chaos and breakdown they describe.” Our own Janet Potter also reviewed Petrushevskaya’s work this week, and she focused on the romantic hopes of its characters. “What’s remarkable,” Potter writes, “is not the love they find, but the fact that they’re looking for it.”
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Discarded Hashtags
“Don’t die on the toilet; / it’s really the worst way to go.” Do yourself a favor and go check out this selection of new poems by Elizabeth Scanlon at Electric Literature.
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The Mystery is Coming From Inside the White House
“One reason presidents are drawn to the genre is surely its escapism — its promise to replace impossible decisions with comforting formulas.” For The New York Times, Craig Fehrman writes about United States presidents who have a predilection for mystery novels. If you need your mystery fix too, we have a list with five crime books with female detectives.
How About Hairballs
“For about 15 years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about 2 a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat. . . . I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.” The New York Times reports that (Year in Reading alum) Jonathan Lethem has sold his papers to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, a trove that includes comic books, manuscript drafts, notes, letters, and yes, drawings of vomiting cats. You can read our review of Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, which may or may not feature hairballs in a crucial plot point, here.
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The Other Side
“Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places.” Luc Sante’s new book, The Other Paris, seeks to uncover Paris’s sedimentary layers of filth and grit. Here he is in an interview with Guernica Magazine.
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