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
Exhausted by Celebrity
“Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs,” reports The Guardian. “About time,” we say.
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Putin Wins the World Cup
“Putin, like Hitler, understood that the purpose of spectacles is to dazzle the eye while clouding the mind.” For the Daily Beast, staff writer Bill Morris writes about the thuggish dictators who love the propaganda of the World Cup. (If you haven’t already checked out our list of seven great soccer reads, do it now!)
How Should An Advice Columnist Be
“What matters is you, all alone at your desk at five in the morning.” We’ve come a long way from Dear Abby and Ann Landers, says Megan Marz in an essay for The Point, in which she looks at a younger generation of columnists that includes Cheryl Strayed, Heather Havrilesky, and Kristen Dombek. And speaking of advice! Have you checked out our new writing-advice counselors Swarm and Spark? No? Well then hie yourself to their column already!
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Never Enough Karen Russell
Karen Russell is everywhere these days. She’s sharing her favorite books about Florida with The New York Times, she’s being interviewed about her writing process on our site, and she’s publishing short fiction for Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading blog. Oh, and she has a new book out, too, as you might have heard.
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Reading Gregor Samsa’s Chart
Have you ever wondered about the astrological sign of your favorite literary character? The writers behind Astro Poets have you covered.
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The Onion Remembers Salinger
The Onion headline Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger: “In this big dramatic production that didn’t do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud.”
Artisans of the Bardic Breath
A couple weeks back, Jonathan Callahan published a crackerjack essay here on Volume 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s My Struggle. Little did we know that, even as he was writing it, he was being interviewed about his own literary debut, The Consummation of Dirk, by none other than…Rick Moody.
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Disturbing the Book Reviews
Over at The New York Times, our own Garth Risk Hallberg reviews A. M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven. And in October, so did we.
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