Out this week: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich; Improvement by Joan Silber; Bunk by Kevin Young; Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag; and Don’t Save Anything by James Salter. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Erdrich; Silber; Young; Sontag; Salter
The Adventures of Getting Rich Quick
"[Mark] Twain wasn’t above the contrivances of capitalism, even as he skewered them. . . From nonage to dotage, in dire straits or in the pink, he was always a capricious entrepreneur, counting the zeroes on an imaginary balance sheet." The New Yorker writes about the humor writer's many failed attempts to get very rich. From our archives: Twain and the Wild West.
Brillante
Is Alejandro Zambra the new great Latin American writer? James Wood thinks he is. In the latest New Yorker, he describes how Zambra’s new story collection alerted him to the writer’s oeuvre, going on to analyze all three of the writer’s novels in English. You could also read our 2011 interview with Zambra.
●
●
Unknown Parables
“The rest of her speech to the U.N. that day is an exact outline for what she wanted the rest of the Parable books to be about — a way out that she did not live to write herself.” For Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma explores the unwritten Parable books of acclaimed sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Pair with our consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
●
●
The Plagiarist
"How I wish he’d stuck to being himself. Instead, he chose to be me." How it feels to have one's poetry plagiarized.
●
●
A Light Roast, Please
File this one under "Things I Didn't Know I Needed" -- actor Paul Giamatti playing Honoré de Balzac hopped up on fifty coffees.
●
●
Jewel Boxes
Colm Tóibín's new book on Elizabeth Bishop is unusually hard to categorize. Part “primer,” part “personal reflection,” in Jonathan Farmer’s words, it moves back and forth between analysis and lyricism, alternating passages of beauty with nuts-and-bolts guides to Bishop’s poems. In Slate, Farmer tries to nail it down. You could also read our own Michael Bourne’s review of Tóibín's The Master.
●
●
Film Time with Steve
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Steve Buscemi’s ranked his top ten films in the Criterion Collection.
●
●