Out this week: Family Trust by Kathy Wang; Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink; Well-Read Black Girl ed. Glory Edim; The White Darkness by David Grann; I Might Regret This by Abbi Jacobson; and Elevation by Stephen King. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Wang; Fink; Edim; Grann; Jacobson; King
Super YA
What if the Hulk kept a diary? Marvel Entertainment’s new young adult books mix superheroes with chicklit. The She-Hulk Diaries and Rogue Touch, featuring the X-Men super heroine as a teenager, are bringing romance back to comics. The biggest surprise, they’re actually good, according to critics at Wired.
What Was the Hipster?
n+1 posts several amusing excerpts from their “What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation” piece to be released in full later this month: “Like ‘douchebag,’ ‘hipster’ was a name that no one could apply to oneself. But the opportunity to call someone else a ‘douchebag’: that offered the would-be hipster a means of self-identification by a name one could say, looking outward. In the douchebag, the hipster had found its Other.”
Quick Links
Patrick Reardon looks at 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die for the Chicago Tribune, and decides he wants to add his own favorites. Check out his eclectic list at the end of the piece. (thanks Steve)Maud mentioned off-hand that she abandons 95% of the books she starts before page 50. Sandra posted that this was “quite a failure rate,” and Maud responds in the comments that in this case she was “pining for a very specific kind of manic reading experience that happens for me maybe ten times a year now rather than every few days, as it did when I was a child.”Dogbert writes a book: “It’s part fake autobiography and part plagiarism” (via H2O)Pinky is about to start an MFA program at Pitt. The reading list looks excellent.Harper Lee will have an item in O of all places. According to the AP story, “a letter for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine on how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town.” It’s for the July “special summer reading issue.”
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The Hobbit, Animated
Sure, the trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit got everyone talking, but it’s so three weeks ago. Here’s something really fresh: a twelve-minute “animatic” version of The Hobbit produced by legendary animator Gene Deitch in 1966.
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Zazen!
Congratulations are in order for Vanessa Veselka: PEN American has awarded her debut novel Zazen the Robert W. Bingham Prize. I first heard about the novel last year, from what was then the brand-spanking-new LARB, though this Minnesota Public Radio profile of Veselka is also a great way to get acquainted with her exciting talents.
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The Twilight Generation
What happens when you grow up reading Harry Potter, Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey? At The Morning News, five women discuss what it meant to come of age reading these books. “It’s more socially acceptable for a guy to watch porn than it is for a twentysomething woman to read these books. There is something that bothers me about that,” one women said.