Out this week: The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski; Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Şafak; One Station Away by Olaf Olafsson; The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai; and No Time to Spare by Ursula le Guin. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Diski; Şafak; Olafsson; Krasznahorkai; le Guin
Between Imitation and Plagiarism
"Language on a daily basis is being recycled. Our students are learning the language of the old and new masters; they are taking them in, mixing their words with the language they know, creating something new. Yet something there remains. Something familiar. Something like a forgotten first kiss. Like a well-known song sung in a different language." Ira Sukrungruang on "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Deep Reading and Mimicry, With an Ending that Totally Plagiarizes Wallace Stevens." After all, who doesn't want to plagiarize Wallace Stevens?
Their Own Room
Were you aware there’s a new BBC2 show about the lives of the Bloomsbury Group? There is, and it’s called Life in Squares, a reference to a quote that says the group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” In The New Statesman, Rachel Cooke sits down with the series. You could also read Alexis Coe on Virginia Woolf and Downton Abbey.
Birnbaum and Brooks
Robert Birnbaum sits down with Pulitzer-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks to discuss Australian literature, Harvard’s (neglected) charter to educate American Indians, and those residents of Martha’s Vineyard who say no to Chardonnay.
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Direct Feed
“Exorbitant cost aside, if I can have the complete works of Shakespeare electronically beamed into my brain in under ten minutes, can I really say I’ve experienced Shakespeare? There is something organic about the experience of moving your eyeballs from left to right over an LCD screen in order to take in a sequence of marks the brain then must interpret as words, all the while using your hands to grip a lightweight, durable device.” Arguing for e-books over beaming text into your brain.
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Limning in 140 Characters
A satirical Michiko Kakutani Twitter presence has emerged, and the (allegedly) real critic has some guesses as to the doppelgänger's identity. EDIT: Lindsay Goldwert's helpfully rounded up the gossip.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Freud; Seskis; Baxter; Vaillant; Puertolas; Oates
Out this week: Mr. Mac and Me by Esther Freud; One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis; Munich Airport by Greg Baxter; The Jaguar’s Children by John Vaillant; The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe by Romain Puertolas; and The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
The War with Drugs
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from comedian and Year In Reading alum Rob Delaney's memoir, Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. "I haven’t been to war, so I can’t comment on what that experience is like, but people who go through rehab or a halfway house walk a tough road together and not all of them make it."