Out this week: Insurrecto by Gina Apostol; The April 3rd Incident by Yu Hua; Death and Other Holidays by Marci Vogel; In/Half by Jasmin B. Frelih; The Patch by John McPhee; and The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Apostol; Hua; Vogel; Frelih; McPhee; Franzen
Nothing Made Up
Sit down with Jessa Crispin, literary blogger and author, at The Rumpus.
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You’ve Been Sleeping on Romance Novels
“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Jamie Green writes for Buzzfeed about how romance novels have gotten more feminist over the years (and still getting a happily ever after) and people are now starting to sit up and take notice.
Timing Is Everything
“In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, actual books are no longer selling.” At The New Republic, Morgan Jerkins talks with agents, authors, booksellers, editors, and publicists about whether the Trump presidency is bad for the book business. And on that note, let’s revisit our own Bill Morris on book releases: “There are few iron facts in the crapshoot of the literary life, but here’s one: In book publishing — no less than in music, war, and sex — timing is everything.”
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Tolstoy, More Than a Century Later
The Atlantic opens up its archives and stumbles across a November, 1891 profile of Leo Tolstoy that foreshadows his death.
Nadia Owusu on Validating Each Other’s Experiences
Author Nadia Owusu gives voice to the grief of people of color—grief that is so often silenced, especially in the workplace.
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The Feeling of Being Watched
To give context to a new William Vollmann essay about reading his own FBI profile (available to subscribers only, sadly), Harper’s Magazine published a few pages from Vollmann’s file online. Among other things, they reveal that the FBI considered Vollman “exceedingly intelligent and possessed with an enormous ego.” (For a taste of the Harper’s essay, you can read this WaPo article on Vollmann’s connection to the Unabomber.)
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