Out this week: Heavy by Kiese Laymon; Girls Write Now by the Girls Write Now program; Melmoth by Sarah Perry; In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt; Trinity by Louisa Hall; Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano; and Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Laymon; GWN; Perry; Hunt; Hall; Modiano, Kingsolver
Magical Journalism
“But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it ‘stunning,’ Susan Sontag hosted him at dinner parties. Gabriel Garcia Marquez dubbed him, simply, ‘the Master’ – high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up Garcia Marquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.” Ryszard Kapuściński: novelist? Journalist? Or something else entirely?
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Odd Jobs
Recommended viewing: The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik talks about his early years in New York writing for the magazine “though they simply weren’t aware of it, or when they were aware of it they were extremely unenthusiastic,” and about all the odd jobs that often make up a writer’s early career, something our own Emily St. James Mandel has written about before.
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After the Wall
“[Christa] Wolf was a committed dissident in the GDR (East Germany) and a forceful voice resisting Western triumphalism after reunification. It would seem like some sort of explanation was owed to the public. Yet how does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past, to the psychological and cultural backdrop of such fateful decisions, is not even subjectively available?” On City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.
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Potent Potables: Presidential Edition
The White House recently released its beer recipe, and that’s swell and all, but for a truly patriotic potable, check out the “Small Beer” brewed for George Washington in 1789.
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The Right Side of History
“I write, always thinking about the generations of black women who came before me, who faced racism and sexism head-on, and in spite of it all, did their work. They encourage me not to despair.” For Vogue, author Brit Bennett writes about 2017, racism, Trump, and the forward progression of time. Pair with: staff writer Ismail Muhammad‘s interview with Bennett.
Our correspondent reports from AWP
Presenting another installment of #LitBeat: The US and UK Poets Laureate at AWP 2012.
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The Real Dystopia
n+1 republished “The End, The End, The End,” an essay by Chad Harbach, in response to the destruction of Sandy.
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Appearing Elsewhere
I have a short story in the latest issue of Avery, a young literary magazine I’ve written about before. Avery 4 also includes fiction by Hannah Tinti, Kevin Canty, Rumaan Alam, Samar Fitzgerald, Sophie Rosenblum, Scott Garson, Callie Collins, James Iredell, Jessica Breheny, Sean Walsh, Anna Villegas, and Michael Bourdaghs. It’s wonderful to have found my story such a sleek and beautiful home, filled with so much good company.Here’s the opening of my tale, called “A Love to Calm the Body”: My grandmother fell in love with her doctor. She liked the way he scrubbed his hands. He also washed his forearms, held them wet in front of his body before taking them to the towel. My grandmother had a weekly appointment; she’d been diagnosed with Hysteria – an excess of emotion, a deep feminine sadness. This was in 1899, when my grandmother was twenty-three, two years married. My mother was only an idea then, hovering at the edges. I wasn’t anything at all.Want to read more? You can order the issue online here.
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