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
The Women Who Reclaimed the Streets
“For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she’s got to be a walker – someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind façades, penetrating into secret courtyards. Virginia Woolf called it ‘street haunting’ in an essay by that name: sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the ‘champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets,’ we leave the things that define us at home, and become ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.’” On the female flâneur. Also check out this Millions essay about the flâneur in modern fiction.
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Rock On
Fancy yourself a trivia buff? This quiz might be your undoing. In The Guardian, you can test your knowledge of prominent bands in fiction, from real-life bands that reference books to bands in famous novels.
Tuesday Links
Clusty has unveiled a very cool Shakespeare search engine, allowing one to sift through all the bard’s works with the push of a button.The Washington Post is hosting live lunchtime chats with various authors over the next two weeks to coincide with the 2006 National Book Festival. The highlight: Geraldine Brooks, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The March on Thursday.Just announced: Another Hannibal book from Thomas Harris called Hannibal Rising, prompting Ed to call Harris “The Laziest Titler in the Publishing Industry.”
Figuratively Unbelievable
Getting sick of people who overuse the word “literally”? A new browser extension kindly replaces instances of the word with “figuratively.” At Slate, Will Oremus tries out a godsend for pedants. (A Millions piece by Fiona Maazel nicely complements his article.)
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So Far So Good
Recommended reading (and reading, and reading): Oyster has listed the “100 Best Books of the Decade So Far,” led by Teju Cole‘s Open City, which was reviewed for the Millions here.