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
Cheating and a Happy Marriage
In The Secret Lives of Wives, more than two hundred women reveal to Iris Krasnow how they keep their relationships together, from separate vacations to “boyfriend with boundaries.”
Drunk Texts From Famous Authors (Part II)
A year and a half later, Jessie Gaynor returns to The Paris Review to follow up her much-appreciated “Drunk Texts From Famous Authors” series. (Part one is here.) On tap this time: T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Blake, and a Flarf poet.
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Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
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I think a lot about myself, therefore I am self.
In the Prospect, an essay on anesthesia, 3D printing, teleportation, LSD, and other thought experiments on self-awareness. Also, this line: “If the spectrum of selfhood begins with the roundworm, surely it ends with Proust.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Lockwood, Salih, Bolaño, and More
This week we're looking at new titles from the likes of Patricia Lockwood, Zak Salih, and Roberto Bolaño.
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Hospital Hijinks
Recommended Reading: The first chapter from Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, “OH MY GOD.”
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Oh Henry
Over thirteen years, John Berryman wrote his famous Dream Songs, composing his most innovative and well-known poetry while his own life began to unravel. In a piece for the LRB, August Kleinzahler reappraises the poet to mark a raft of new editions of his work, citing Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow and other contemporaries in the process. Pair with Stephen Akey on The Dream Songs.