Out this week: The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce; Green by Sam Graham-Felsen; A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee; Luxury by Philip Schultz; and The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi.
Tuesday New Release Day: Joyce; Graham-Felsen; Mukherjee; Schultz; Kureishi
Blind Date with Dostoevsky
At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of her 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky. (via Book Bench)
●
●
Discovering Ice
Recommended Reading: On the secret history of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
●
●
Erdrich’s Love Medicine
In the latest from The Atlantic’s By Heart series, ex-Granta editor John Freeman discusses Louise Erdrich’s interpretation of Faulkner in Love Medicine. Pair with an essay on the pacing of Faulkner’s prose.
Stiff Manners
It takes a certain skill to link Taipei by Tao Lin, My Struggle Part I and Part II by Karl Ove Knausgaard and an old book on Italian painting in a single essay, but Zadie Smith is (naturally) the writer for the job. In a new piece for The NY Review of Books, she asks the reader to “imagine [a drawing of a corpse] represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse.”
Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day
The new release schedule is slowing down as the holidays approach, but David Foster Wallace fans can now get their hands on his undergraduate thesis, packaged by Columbia University Press as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.
●
●
Flexible Cinderella
On the persistent popularity and flexibility of Cinderella, from old folktales featuring talking gourds all the way to the upcoming Disney version, from NPR.
●
●