Out this week: Venture of the Infinite Man by Pablo Neruda; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems; and a new translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Neruda; Ferlinghetti; Dostoevsky
Two Tickets to the Gun Show. Literally.
This Bright River author Patrick Somerville visited the Lakemoor Gun Show with our own Emily St. John Mandel, and then wrote about the experience for GQ.
“The Scopes Monkey Trial of American literary culture”
That dictionary sitting on your bookshelf has a more scandalous past than you might think.
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The Top Journalism of the Decade
A group at NYU's journalism school has named "The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States." Four of these are books: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.
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“A big furry fish in a tiny barrel”
As a young girl in the 1980s, Melissa Carroll played with My Little Pony dolls, in part because, as she puts it, "I knew I'd better have one." Nearly thirty years on, she's fascinated by the new surge of interest in the dolls, especially the interest displayed by the men who call themselves Bronies. At The Rumpus, her Sunday essay on the rise of the Brony and gender dynamics in America.
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Robert McCrum on books
Would you rather have a long literary career, or write a brilliant, successful one-off? Robert McCrum considers the literary career arc.
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Cover to Cover
Here at The Millions, we know the importance of a book's cover (for evidence see here, here, here and here), so Margaret Sullivan's new project, Jane Austen Cover to Cover, has our attention. A sample of covers for Emma, available on The Paris Review's blog, "provides a fascinating glimpse into a variety of publishing cultures, and it reminds that even our classics are mutable, pitched to appeal to any number of sensibilities, their literary status in constant flux per the dictates of the market."
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Uber Nichts
George Bernard Shaw had a strange relationship with Nietzsche. Alternately envious and dismissive of the German philosopher, Shaw once said he wanted to be an intellectual in Nietzsche’s mold, though he also felt Nietzsche’s thinking was addled and self-absorbed. In an essay for The New Statesman, Michael Holroyd tries to make sense of Shaw’s views.
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