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
Listen Carefully
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with Erika Meitner about straight-forward poetics and poetry as a tool for social justice.
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Rabbit Run
“[C]hildren often prefer the factual over the fantastical. And a growing body of work suggests that when it comes to storybooks, they also learn better from stories that are realistic. For example, preschool-aged children are more likely to learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed realistically as opposed to anthropomorphically.” Two new studies suggest that where learning is concerned, realism trumps fantasy in children’s books. Which is as good a time as any to ask our own Jacob Lambert‘s question: Are picture books leading our children astray?
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Book Burning Reimagined
“In an ironic twist, Super Terrain, a publisher in France, has created a new edition of Bradbury’s classic that actually requires extreme heat in order to be read.” The prototype copy of Fahrenheit 451, which looks fully blacked-out until you apply heat, may be available to the general book-buying public in 2018. Check out: an essay about Ray Bradbury from our archives.
The sublime everyday
Tom Perotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers, talks about how he learned to write about ordinary life from Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. “The tragedy is that, while we’re alive, we don’t view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don’t—we can’t—value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they’ll one day be gone forever.”
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Feeding Minds and Mouths
“For kids to be well-read, they need to be well-fed.” The New York Times reports on the trend of U.S. libraries providing summer meals to children.
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How the Sausage Gets Made
“Being a judge for the Man Booker prize has at times felt like being part of a team of archaeologists excavating some vast buried city. Once the dust has settled – after nine months of reading – you stand back to survey your labours and realise all that’s left is a small pile of gleaming fragments. I hadn’t expected the process to be quite so emotionally exhausting. Nor had I thought it would be quite so exhilarating.” In case you’re curious, a Man Booker Prize arbiter offers up his reflections on the judging process. See also: the shortlist itself, which has surprised many readers!