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
Keys Under the Basket
“Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!” Introducing literary couchsurfing.
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Marketing Creativity
Tim Parks writes at NYRB about the constraints that the marketplace puts on writers' creativity. For more on publishing and the marketplace, check out our column on The Future of the Book.
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Vindicating Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft had quite a few things to be angry about. McSweeney’s vindicates her anger. Pair with our own Anne K. Yoder’s piece on finding space to write in a relationship.
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Emily St. John Mandel on Outrider
Our own Emily St. John Mandel dropped by the Outrider podcast to talk about Australian literary festivals (among other things).
Springfield, Springfield, It’s a Hell of a Town!
In a big reveal to devout fans like me, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening finally copped to the fictional Springfield's real-life inspiration: Springfield, Oregon. Of course this matter has been widely pondered before, and was perhaps even answered by Paul Nelson and his cohorts at SNPP.com.
“A move that was, in a way, Chappelle’s birthright”
The thing about Dave Chappelle, writes Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in her marvelous essay on the comedian’s family history, the success of Chappelle’s Show, and how the two informed his opinions on race, “is that he was suddenly vaulted into the awkward position of being the world’s most famous interlocutor in a conversation about race—the one conversation no one likes having.” In light of his recent heckling in Connecticut, as well as the continued misinterpretation of his comedy, “it’s easy to understand why Chappelle was done with being misread, tired of explaining, [and so he] finished talking.”