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
What’s In A Name?
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The Back of the Face
“A neck cannot be modern. A neck is in time, belongs to time, but is not formed by it. My guess is that even photos of Neanderthal necks would not differ significantly… [They are] in a certain sense, pure nature. Something that grows in a certain place, the way tree trunks grow, or mussels, fungi, moss.” Recommended reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard on the sanctity of bodies, the nature of truth, and the back of the neck. The third volume of Knausgaard’s bestselling My Struggle hit American bookshelves last week. (Check out our own review of Knausgaard’s previous volumes.)
Suffering isn’t nice.
Why does the mythological connection between suffering and creativity persist? Writers and other artists, AL Kennedy contends, should spend less time intent on suffering and more time intent on making things. See also our own Sonya Chung, on the new writerly happiness.