agggregator

Mary Louise Kelly talks to journalist and Shanghai resident Lenora Chu about educating her young son in the Chinese public education system. Chu has written a book called: Little Soldiers . books http://ift.tt/2xCMxo5 September 28, 2017 at 01:00PM

Authors Philip and Erin Stead have turned 16 pages of Mark Twain's notes — on a serial bedtime story he wove for his daughters — into a new children's book, The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine. (Image credit: Erin Stead) books http://ift.tt/2k4brdf September 28, 2017 at 12:46PM

I. ON MAY 23, 1990, a one-act verse drama opened at a tiny experimental theater called the RAPP Arts Center, on East 4th Street in Manhattan. Its author, Thomas M. Disch, had written the script “in a ten-day marathon, sequestered in a cottage in the Poconos.” Disch’s commercial hopes for the play were not high: a working theater critic for The Nation , he was acutely aware of “the normal mortality rate of Off-Off-Broadway productions” (later, speaking to an interviewer, he described the RAPP Theater as “as far Off-Off-Broadway as Broadway can get”). The show’s initial three-week run passed without incident: “The play,” Disch wrote later, “got a good amount of critical attention but not the make-or-break authentication of notice by The New York Times .” A lone rave in Theater Week , comparing the play’s cult potential to that of  The Rocky Horror Picture Show , convinced Jeffrey Cohen, the RAPP’s artistic director, to bring it back for an open-ended revival. That was when the trou...

IN JULIA WALTON’S debut novel, Words on Bathroom Walls , it’s 2012 and our protagonist, Adam Petrazelli, is 16 and just transitioning from public school to a private Catholic school. He has to deal with the tribulations every new kid faces: bullies, crushes, making new friends, plus all the unfamiliar traditions and restrictions that characterize a religious school. On top of that, Adam has schizophrenia, complete with reality-bending visual and auditory hallucinations. His condition manifests as reoccurring characters that may just be materializations of his emotional states. When we meet Adam, he’s started an experimental drug that allows him to, if not control his hallucinations, then ignore them. Each chapter takes the form of a letter to Adam’s therapist, whom he refuses to talk to in person. This epistolary form draws the reader intimately into Adam’s world, making the book a wonderfully sharp and funny coming-of-age story. The following interview is excerpted from a longer con...

Release Date:  September 19, 2017 Publisher:  Ballantine Books Format:  Kindle Pages:  386 Pages Genre:  fiction Buy:   Kindle  |  Hardcover  Synopsis:  The Woodburys cherish life in the affluent, bucolic suburb of Avalon Hills, Connecticut. George is a beloved science teacher at the local prep school, a hero who once thwarted a gunman, and his wife, Joan, is a hardworking ER nurse. They have brought up their children in this thriving town of wooded yards and sprawling lakes. Then one night a police car pulls up to the Woodbury home and George is charged with sexual misconduct—with students from his daughter’s school. As he sits in prison awaiting trial and claiming innocence— is it possible?— Joan vaults between denial and rage as friends and neighbors turn cold. Their daughter, seventeen-year-old Sadie, is a popular high school senior who becomes a social outcast—and finds refuge in an unexpected place. Her brother, Andrew,...

I READ Jenny Zhang’s work for the first time in Poetry magazine in 2015. I knew by the time I finished her prose poem “How It Feels” that Zhang was a writer whose narratives would keep expanding my view of what’s possible in literature. When her new short story collection Sour Heart landed on several “most anticipated books of 2017” lists, distinguished as the first release from Lena Dunham’s Lenny imprint, I instantly preordered. Sour Heart consists of seven stories about Chinese immigrant families. Zhang’s genre-bending intrigues me, and so does her focus on young girl narrators. But what I appreciate most about Zhang is how she explores tragic circumstances without the pity that often accompanies the kinds of events she describes: high school suicide attempts, torture scenes in revolutionary China, impoverished parents dumpster-diving for food scraps. In Sour Heart , Zhang normalizes the most desperate human behavior, giving readers the space to observe her characters without ju...

In this standalone novel, Ann Leckie returns to the world of her award-winning Ancillary trilogy with a different mission — a cozy mystery about the theft of some politically sensitive antiques. (Image credit: ) books http://ift.tt/2fz1fbj September 27, 2017 at 03:00PM

Aleksandar Hemon writes about the peculiar and particular joys of being part of a television-writers’ room for the Netflix show “Sense8.”books http://ift.tt/2wjun9v September 27, 2017 at 01:00PM

Egan's sweeping new historical novel doesn't just draw from the classic catalog of New York stories — it also takes its place among them. (Image credit: Library of Congress) books http://ift.tt/2xxUkDH September 26, 2017 at 11:18PM

Author Candice Millard argues that Churchill's battlefield coverage and daring escape from capture while serving as a correspondent for a British newspaper were turning points in his life. books http://ift.tt/2yrt09F September 26, 2017 at 11:18PM

IN 1996, while I was still young enough to not yet feel ridiculous about such endeavors, I formed a living room garage band with an actress named Jennifer. We called ourselves Light Skindid, based on the way certain of us black people pronounce “light skinned.” Jennifer, all big curls and freckles, wasn’t truly light skindid. (A classic redbone is what she was.) And by summer’s end my own body is deep brown as an unwrapped chocolate bar. Light Skindid was supposed to be about a sound. A lighter shade of black. Joan Armatrading meets Terence Trent D’Arby. A Joshua Redman solo. A vibe that was futuristic above all else. Inopportunely, Jennifer and I were shitty musicians. Light Skindid never took. It seems happenstance that The Color of Water hit in 1995, although one never knows for certain what happens up there in the ether. James McBride’s hit memoir debut, concerning life with his white and Jewish mother, only hinted that its author could down the road become a don of light-skinn...

The following interview is excerpted from Sam Weller’s Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews , out this month in a hardcover deluxe edition from Los Angeles–based Hat & Beard Press. ¤ LOS ANGELES: The Santa Ana winds blew dry and hot. Ray Bradbury sat in the front seat of a town car, headed south on the 405 Freeway. As the automobile approached an overpass, Bradbury looked out the windshield at the roadway above. Painted along the side was a mural of graffiti art: a swirling black tag of graceful letters, illegible at 60 miles per hour, all surrounded by a splash of vibrant spray-painted color. “That’s wonderful!” Bradbury remarked, just catching a glimpse of the illegal artwork before the car passed beneath it. “I wonder how those artists hang from the overpasses to do that?”   A few days later, Bradbury sat down to write the short story, “ Ole , Orozco! Siqueiros, Si !,” a tale about a Los Angeles graffiti artist who dies while hanging from an overpass. The ...