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
Plant That (Literary) Flag
“In no particular order, except one of hallelujah, here’s a necessarily partial list of some other living Korean American writers whose work or person, or both, I’ve had the great good luck of encountering”….you’ll have to read the interview for the lengthy list as well as the thoughts of four Korean American writers who gathered at the behest of R.O. Kwon to discuss the influence and impact of Alexander Chee. It’s full of beautiful insights from Kwon, Nicole Chung, Alice Sola Kim, and Matthew Salesses such as “Alex said he ‘wanted to plant that flag in the culture,’ and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave”. Chee’s newest book is an essay collection, How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, that we eagerly anticipated last month.
Medvedev’s America
Kirill Medvedev’s “America: A Prophecy” has been published for Triple Canopy as part of the “Immaterial Literature” project. The suite, translated by n+1 editor Keith Gessen, is composed of pieces from the Russian poet’s forthcoming It’s No Good collection.
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Inside the Hive-Mind of the Class of 2013
For the Class of 2013, salsa has always outsold ketchup. For these and other wry conjectures, see the latest edition Beloit College’s annual “Mindset List.” (N.B.: For the class of 2013, “mindset” is not a clunky neologism.)
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Not the Worst Thing
Step one: go read A. Igoni Barrett’s bravura confessional for The Millions. Step two: go check out this excerpt from his upcoming book in Guernica.
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Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
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Oh, Gross
Over at The Paris Review, Hannah Tennant-Moore defends the merits of disturbing literature. We are fascinated with the disturbing, because, as Tennant-Moore asserts, “wonder, disgust: both feelings are true.” Here’s a bonus piece on A.M. Homes‘ darkly comic May We Be Forgiven and on comforting the disturbed — or is it disturbing the comforted?
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