Game of Thrones is dead. Er, over. Oh no! What to read now? Over at Electric Literature, Seth D. Michaels has you covered, suggesting a list of books to read post-GoT that includes work by N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kirstin Downey. “At its best,” Michaels writes, the original book series “is both a page-turning adventure and a revisionist fantasy, surfacing some of the hard questions underneath the tropes of the genre. Who has a legitimate claim on power, and what can they do with it? How does the past determine and constrain today? How can women exert power in a cruel and oppressive world? How do personal relationships shape politics, and vice-versa?”
Books for a Post-‘Game of Thrones’ World
Punctuate With Extreme Prejudice
Noreen Malone – writing in Slate – launches a rearguard action against the em-dash. Is it fair to harbor punctuation prejudice? If so, a confession: I can’t stand the ampersand.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Malcolm, Percy, Drury, Barrett, Kertész
New! This! Week! Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm, Red Moon by Benjamin Percy, Pacific by Tom Drury, Love Is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett (read his piece at The Millions), and Dossier K, a memoir from Novel winner Imre Kertész.
Claire Vaye Watkins Takes Home the Dylan Thomas Prize
Kudos to Claire Vaye Watkins for taking home the Dylan Thomas Prize! Worth £30,000, the prize went to Watkins because, in the words of of the chair of the judging panel, she possesses “some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form.” (Read more about Watkins’s work in Geoff Mak’s review of her 2012 book Battleborn.)
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O’Reilly Book Burn
U.S. forces stationed in a remote area of Afghanistan recently received about twenty copies of Bill O’Reilly’s book Pinheads and Patriots. Their orders upon receiving the tomes: Burn them.
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New from Neil Gaiman
Exciting news, Neil Gaiman fans! The author will release The View from the Cheap Seats, a collection of his non-fiction work, this May. For more Gaiman, check out our own Tess Malone’s review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.