Out this week: The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani; Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro; A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare; The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette; The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin; Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett; Neon in Daylight by Hermione Hoby; This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff; The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce; Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates; and King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich. For more on these and other new titles, go read our brand new book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Slimani; Quatro; Kadare; Winnette; Benjamin; Hughes-Hallett; Hoby; Medoff; Pierce; Yates; Rich
The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
Adventures in Journalism
Bono and Bob Geldof guest edited Monday’s issue of the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto.
Record-A-Poem
Celebrate National Poetry Month by recording a poem for the Poetry Foundation.
Reading in Prison
“[H]is authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books.” Alex Halberstadt writes about “A Prisoner’s Reading List” for The New Yorker. It’s available online, and soon a lot more New Yorker articles will be too.