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
Photographic Thaw
If you’re going to accidentally leave almost two dozen unprocessed photo negatives out for 100 years, there’s no better place to store them than a block of ice in Antarctica. Conservationists restoring an Antarctic exploration hut found the negatives left from Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal 1910-13 Terre Nova Expedition to the South Pole. For a less harrowing tale of Arctic exploration, check out our review of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
●
●
“The Lennon Letters” Due Out October 2012
Yoko Ono has permitted the publication of a book of John Lennon’s personal letters “to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organizations, lawyers and the laundry.” The Lennon Letters is due out October 2012, and will be edited by Hunter Davies, author of the authorized biography The Beatles.
●
●
Occupy a Classroom
NYU students can take a 4-credit undergraduate course on Occupy Wall Street and America’s debt issues this spring. According to the university’s website, this year’s tuition costs start at $19,672.
●
●
Strange Cults, Powerful Elders, and Other Features of Academia
Does this harrowing plot summary describe a critically acclaimed film of the 2010s, or does it describe your PhD program?
●
●
●
“Life is not personal.”
“This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession. Its goal isn’t sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It’s fodder for argument. To put the “I” to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.” Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes for The Atlantic about alternatives to the confessional mode in literature.
Murakami Controversy
Haruki Murakami‘s Norwegian Wood has been dropped from one New Jersey school’s syllabus due to “some words and language that seemed to be inappropriate as far as the parents and some of the kids were concerned.” His publisher A. A. Knopf has issued a statement in response.
Elaborate Gilded Contraptions
I wonder if this historical look at the crafting of espresso machines in The Smithsonian will make you think, as I did, about how incredibly Steam Punk a good cappuccino can be.
●
●