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
Don’t Be Her
Want to be a female travel writer? That’s great, says Jessa Crispin, just please don’t be Elizabeth Gilbert.
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Out There
A half-century ago, Thomas Berger published Little Big Man, a satire of Westerns that helped increase the stature of the Western genre as a whole. To mark the book’s 50th anniversary, Allen Barra reflects on its legacy, suggesting that it’s as good a candidate as any for the title of Great American Novel. Related: Daniel Kalder on the odd phenomenon of the Euro-Western.
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A Century of Cheever
Allan Gurganus commemorates the 100th anniversary of his teacher and friend John Cheever’s birth. “Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia,” Gurganus writes, “was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal in a nation this Republican.”
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Lambda Literary Award Finalists
Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Award Finalists, who were announced this week. Finalists include Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Spender (our review of his memoir), and Truman Capote.
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Pricey Pads
A real estate blog has calculated the approximate value of Hogwarts, and you might be surprised to learn that it’s worth only a fraction of a real life abode in Mumbai, and only about three times more than one in Orlando.