Out this week: Radiant Shimmering Light by Sarah Selecky; Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield; North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah; The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht; and The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Selecky; Setterfield; Farah; Brecht; Barbash
Is There Life on Pallas?
John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar isn’t the only vintage science fiction novel making waves this week. Andrew Joron takes a look at “German fantasist” Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio – a 1913 novel that was recently reissued by the folks at Wakefield Press.
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The New York Times Reviews The Pale King
C author Tom McCarthy takes on The Pale King in the New York Times Book Review this week. Separately, though the hard cover of The Pale King shipped and appeared on shelves ahead of the announced April 15 release date, the Kindle version only became available yesterday, right on schedule.
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The Open Destiny of Life
“How can you write a complete story without a conventional plot? We often hear that in short stories, the main character must change. But in some stories, including some by Grace Paley, the characters don’t change. Instead, her stories change the reader. You’re different by the time you reach the end.” We’ve told you about The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series plenty of times before. This week, it’s Alice Mattison, who touches on everything from character development to the strange stories of Grace Paley.
Auspicious Beginnings
Please welcome the newest Millions reader: Amos O’Driscoll Hallberg, born Saturday morning. Congrats Garth!
The Count
“And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: ‘Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.'” Wikipedia has got a women writers problem.
Tournament of Books Zombie Round
After three years of judging, and now “like one of those guys who comes back after graduation and loiters creepily around campus, remembering [his] faded glory days,” our site’s editor-in-chief C. Max Magee finally made it into the booth for the zombie round in The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books. Check out the perils of “the ARC onslaught” and which books were missing from the tournament altogether.
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P.D. James Passes Away
Author P.D. James, “the Queen of crime writing” and subject of one of our Post-4o Bloomers essays, has passed away, reports the BBC.
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The Night I Am Heading Into
In Case You Missed It: This email exchange between playwright Sarah Ruhl and the late Max Ritvo, whose Four Reincarnations is out next week: “I think my mind is a set of lapis lazuli steps falling apart, and all I want is to be told ‘it’s alright, we rebuild it every day’ But what is the it? What is it? And if I was vaporized by a ray gun but was then replaced instantly by an identical person with an identical filigree of nerves shot through with identical sparks cased in an identical skull—would it still be me? I don’t think so. I don’t know if even a perfect Reincarnation would be a Reincarnation to me, in my heart. I’m starting to feel like Theseus and I just want my fucking ship out of the dry-dock and back on the water.”