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
People Truly Engaged in Life Have Messy Houses
The Guardian interviews Year in Reading alumna Ottessa Moshfegh about her writing life, noir fiction, and her novel Eileen. As she puts it, “I’m interested in taking establishment genre and turning it on its head. I didn’t really set out to write a noir novel and I don’t know if I exactly have.”
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New André 3000 on the way
The possibility of a new André 3000 solo album (even if it’s “no sure thing”) is liable to make this writer giddy. Fun Fact: In a print-only interview with Oxford American, National Book Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward nominated Three Stacks as “the most underrated Southern writer.” (And she’s a fan of his collaborations with Frank Ocean, too.) You shouldn’t have needed an endorsement, but if you did, then that should be good enough for you.
Convincing Reconstructions
“Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind.” On the role of realist historical fictions.
Adventures in Journalism
Bono and Bob Geldof guest edited Monday’s issue of the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto.
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