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
A Conversation with Morgan Parker
On his podcast, David Naimon spoke with poet Morgan Parker about her new collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s a book “at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence,” Naimon says. (Bonus: Parker’s book was recently featured in Nick Ripatrazone’s list of five poetry collections you should buy.)
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Chelsea Girl
Eileen Myles is the weird poet that the mainstream is finally starting to accept. Here’s an essay from Stephanie LaCava at The Millions on how social media helped to push Myles’s historically ignored avant-garde world into the mainstream.
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Cynthia Nixon to Play Emily Dickinson
Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon has been tapped to play Emily Dickinson in a new biopic from Terence Davies. In a lucky break for that film’s stylists and wardrobe people, the number of extant photographs of Dickinson has recently doubled.
Miss Masterpiece
“The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan.” On Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkest American masterpiece.
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Douglas Adams Poem Unearthed
This month, a Brentwood School archivist unearthed a two-page poem entitled “A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining.” The kicker? It was written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams, nine years before he published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
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