Out this week: All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy; Come with Me by Helen Schulman; The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose; Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates; and Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Roy; Schulman; Rose; Oates; Énard
Shatzkin on Digital Revolution
“The book business is a cork floating on a digital device stream,” writes Mike Shatzkin. Is publishing living “in a world not of its own making?”
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Bond. Sixty Years of Bond.
Beth Carswell takes a look at sixty years’ worth of James Bond book designs. Which one is your favorite?
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A Little Too Into It
Novels that focus on obsessive characters hinge on persnickety details. The need to depict accurately the mind of an obsessive demands that the novelist overemphasize the trifling and tangential. In The Kenyon Review, Vanessa Blakeslee reviews a new and representative example of the form, The Understory by Pamela Erens. Sample quote: “When the smaller steps of daily life are magnified, does that narrative reach its greatest potential for a unified and powerful resonance?” FYI, Erens has written for us.
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A Belated Welcome
A belated welcome to the newest Millions staff writer Janet Potter. Janet is a Chicago writer and indie bookstore vet who’s already written several pieces for us on a number of books, most notably her controversial takedown of Stieg Larsson.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frame, London, Stafford, Tennyson, Bennet
Janet Frame’s posthumous novel In the Memorial Room is out this week, as is a new e-book edition of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Also out: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems by the onetime Poet Laureate William Stafford; a new biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the latest edition of The Best American Magazine Writing.
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Over the Frontier
“I have a happy nature, / But Mother is always sad, / I enjoy every moment of my life, / – Mother has been had.” Saturday got you down? Here are a few brilliant little poems and their accompanying doodles by the late, great Stevie Smith.
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