Out this week: Mean by Myriam Gurba; They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib; Wonder Valley by Ivy Pochoda; Radio Free Vermont by Bill McKibben; a new translation of Homer’s The Odyssey; and Heather, the Totality by Matthew Weiner. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Gurba; Willis-Abdurraqib; Pochoda; McKibben; Homer; Weiner
Greed is Good Again
There’s a trailer out for the upcoming sequel to Wall Street. Gordon Gekko and his giant mobile phone are back. He is joined, regrettably, by Shia LaBeouf.
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On Fear and Dread
Mary Ruefle, author of the forthcoming Madness, Rack, and Honey, wrote a poetic essay on the subject of fear. It’s chock full of lines like this one about why she likes the word dread more than the word fear: “because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there.”
Marriage in Literature
In response to the Bookends question, “What is the Best Portrayal of a Marriage in Literature?,” Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes movingly about the poetry of Jack Gilbert and concludes that “this is marriage: not knowing one’s wife but constantly relearning her, not possessing her but rediscovering her, constantly finding a new beloved within the already familiar spouse.” For a slightly different perspective on marriage in literature, look no further than our own Matt Seidel‘s “Survey of Literature’s Non-Traditional Marriage Proposals.”
Going Back Up There
It’s not every day that fans of a novel look forward to a Lifetime movie, but such is the case for fans of Flowers in the Attic, whose 1987 film adaptation left out many of the details that made the book a “rite of passage for teenage girls in the ‘80s.” At Slate, Tammy Oler delves into the book’s importance and its history on the screen.
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