Evaluation researchers are faced with paradoxical findings on the effectiveness of treatment programs when the amount of treatment correlates negatively with outcome. For example, in a recent psychiatric study (Canfield, 1984) a negative correlation was found between the amount of time staff spent with patients and outcome. Furthermore, statistically controlling for chronicity in a multiple regression does not change the negative relationship of treatment to outcome. This means that the more staff involvement the less change the patients made and the less staff involvement than the more positive change the patients made.
These are curious results when one may expect a positive correlation between amount of treatment and outcome. Further, the model of treatment reimbursement ( ) in may fields seems to demand that positive relationships be found since amount of treatment increases cost. One explanation may be that the treatment resulted in the patients getting worse, since the longer in treatment the less favorable outcome.
However, another explanation might be that "effective dose" for chronic patients is more than that for acute patients. At the same time even with an "effective dose" the chronic patient is less likely to improve. Consequently, when dose size (or length of treatment) is correlated with outcome it will often be negative, even though the program might have been effective.
Further, this problem will often exist in the evaluation of on‑going programs where people are continued in treatments based on their progress. Clients who have not yet recovered will most likely receive more treatment. Since it is these same people who are more resistant to treatment the correlation will be negative. It would seem that this could occur in settings such as: (1) schools, (2) training programs, (3) the legal system, and (4) medical treatment.
When some psychiatric patients recover more quickly than others, the explanation may be that the more slowly recovering patient was more chronically ill. The implication is that some patients will need more treatment than others to make equal outcome gains. If patient differences (e.g., chronicity) are not included in the evaluation/research design then it is possible that no relationship will be found when in fact, a relationship may exist. Or, as in the example below, there is apparently a negative relationship but when the interaction is assessed the relationship is positive. The program could be effective but there will not be a correlational relationship because the chronic patients who received a considerable amount of treatment did not improve more than the acutely ill patients who improved with less treatment. The purpose of this paper is to show how this can be assessed by using interactions.
It it first necessary to find the means and standard devaiations of STAFF and CHRON and is accomplished with the following job stream.
That data is used to create the following job stream.
In an psychiatric hospital daily ratings were recorded which indicated the amount of involvement of patients in various activities such as recreation, work assignments, socialization, and so forth. The rating of the degree of patient involvement with the ward staff was used as the independent variable in this example. In addition, at admission the patient completed a questionnaire which included a rating of the tension experienced during the prior week. This questionnaire was repeated 6 months later. A residualized change score, as recommended by Cronbach and Furly (1970), was computed on tension scores to serve as the independent variable. A positive high score represents tension reduction between admission and follow‑up.
The data for the sample of 16 patients is presented in Table 1. The first column is the patient's identification number. The second column is the reduction of tension score (outcome or dependent variable). The third column is a rating of the average daily staff involvement with the patient (treatment or independent variable). The fourth column is the z‑score of staff involvement. The fifth column indicates the number of previous hospitalizations and is used for an index of chronicity of the patient (modifier variable). The sixth column is the z‑score for the number of hospitalizations. The seventh column is the product of hospitalization z‑score and staff involvement z‑score (product vector or adjusted variable).
TABLE 1. Original and z‑scores for staff involvement and number of previous hospitalizations; the product of staff and previous hospitalizations; and outcome.
The correlation matrix of the independent, dependent, modifier, and adjusted variables is presented in Table 2. The correlation between amount of staff involvement and reduction of tension was r = ‑.82. If the modifier is entered in a linear regression equation with the independent variable, there is little increase in the multiple regression (R=.85). As indicated above this represents the dilemma because it appears that more treatment results in an unfavorable outcome.
TABLE II. Correlation matrix of previous hospitalizations, staff involvement, optimized variable, and outcome.
The interaction between the independent variable and chronicity explains these results. The interaction between treatment and chronicity can be calculated by multiplying the z‑ scores of the independent variable by the z‑scores of the modifier variable. The result of this is an adjusted variable which can be correlated with the dependent variable. Table 2 shows that the adjusted variable is positively correlated with the dependent variable, r=.72. The direction of correlation has reversed from the initial correlation between the independent variable and outcome (r=‑.82).
The scatterplots presented in Figures 1, 2, and 3 show how the reversal takes place and how to interpret its meaning. Figure 1 shows the negative relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable. Figure 2 shows the positive relationship between the adjusted variable and the dependent variable.
These quadrants represent patients who were well matched to the treatment. Chronic patients who needed more treatment received more treatment and acute patients who needed less treatment received less treatment. These adjusted scores reflect patients who are matched to treatment with positive (high) scores. It should be noted that this matching (or optimization) represents an hypothesis to be tested. The hypothesis is that chronic patients need more treatment than acute patients in order to make equal outcome gains.
These quadrants represent patients who were mismatched to the treatment according to the theory. Chronic patients who needed more treatment received less and acute patients who needed less treatment received more. The adjusted scores reflect a mismatch in that the results are negative (low) scores. The adjusted variable, then, is an indicator of degree of optimization or matching (according to the hypothesis): a high score represents optimization while a low score represents a discrepancy. If this adjusted score is positively related to outcome then the hypothesis that chronic patients should receive more treatment is supported.
The scatterplots in Figures 1, 2, and 3 and the data in Table 1 show how the data in the example data fit the adjusted scores. An acute patient (low chronicity) receiving little treatment would obtain the high adjusted score, as shown by cases 1, 9, and 14 in Figure 3. Note that these cases are in the lower left hand quadrant of the table. The z‑scores for these variables are presented in Table 1. The z‑scores for case 1 are ‑1.61 for treatment and ‑.88 for chronicity. The result of multiplying ‑1.61 by ‑.88 is 1.42 a positive score on the adjusted variable. Consequently, the score changed from a high negative score on STAFF to a high positive score on the adjusted variable (SXC). The same is true of cases 9 and 14. It can be noted on the change from Fig 1 to Fig 2 that these cases change from negative to positive.
Cases 16 and 13 represent a mismatch change for the adjusted score. Case 13 was positive on treatment (z = 1.74) but negative on chronicity (z = ‑.88). The result is a negative adjusted score of ‑1.52 which indicates lack of optimal treatment according to the theory. Consequently, the cases in the upper left quadrant of Figure 3 resulted in changing the positive staff scores to negative adjusted scores.
This adjusted variable that represents degree of optimization can now be correlated with outcome. If it correlates with outcome, it would indicate that patients who got the appropriate amount of treatment got better and patients who did not receive the optimal treatment did no get better. It indicates that patients who were matched for treatment (chronic patients more treatment and acute patients less treatment) obtained high positive outcomes and patients who were mismatched for treatment obtained low or negative outcomes.
This interaction can take place also when the original dependent variable correlates zero with the dependent variable. Six cases were arbitrarily added to the original 16 cases to show this effect. The data are found in Table 3, the resulting correlation matrix is in Table 4, and scatterplots are in Figures 4, 5, and 6. The correlation matrix in Table 4 shows that the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable is .00 and the relationship between the adjusted variable and the dependent variable is .91 thus demonstrating the it is not necessary for the original independent variable to be negative.
TABLE III. Data with 6 cases added to show relationships.
A comparison of the two sets of data also demonstrates the difference between the moderator variable and modifier variable. As noted earlier the definition of the modifier variable is defined differently than a moderator variable (e.g., Ghiselli) in that a moderator variable must increase the variance accounted for in a multiple regression. In the first example the modifier is reversed from the dependent variable (in the first example) ‑ making a considerable difference in interpretation. Both relationships are significant in the opposite direction the added variance, however, in the multiple regression only about 2% of the variance is added in the multiple regression by the addition of the adjusted variable.
It can be noted in this second example that the adjusted variable would add 80% variance beyond the independent variable. So that in this instance the test of the added variance in a multiple correlation would be an adequate test of the variable. However, as seen in the previous example if the relationship is reversed (the sign changed) then the multiple regression may not detect this such a difference.
This raises the issue of how the test of significance should be assessed. The method of using multiple regression to the change by adding the adjusted variable is not appropriate because it can be seen that a complete reversal if direction without significance. One possible method would be to test the difference between rxy and ray. However, that would only test the interaction and it is possible that rxy might negative while ray would be zero resulting in a significant interaction. Even though the difference is significant the zero correlation of ray indicates no relationship between the modified variable and the independent variable.
Consequently, the following rules would seem to apply: (1) if the signs are opposite the ray correlation could be tested for significance beyond zero, and (2) if the signs are the same, then the method of testing the additional variance beyond the independent variable should be used.


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Mol on Mercedes: 'That's what Max feeling in Brazil'
The Formula 1 season has three races to go, increasing the tension at Mercedes and Red Bull Racing. However, it is not just about the performance of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, because behind the scenes the rear wing of the Briton is the topic of the month. According to Olav Mol this might lead to a protest from Red Bull. The commentator tells Formula 1 Cafe about Hamilton's flexible rear wing. "The outside of the wing is hard, but the middle part is just very soft. That's what Max ended up feeling in Brazil. It bends open at 260 km/h even before the DRS opens. So you get an opening before the DRS happens. And that is simply not allowed", says Mol. Read more Jos Verstappen...
1y ago from GPBlog.com 0
Red Bull still looking at Mercedes' rear wing
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Mercedes has denied that it has "score marks" on its rear wing...
1y ago from MotorsportWeek.com
Horner reveals: Verstappen had damage to his rear wing...
The soap opera surrounding Lewis Hamilton' s rear wing has strained...
Mercedes' Shovlin dismisses rear wing 'score mark'...
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17m ago from GPFans.com

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Chicago Bears will put a lid on beer sales during next Monday night's football game against the Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field.
Park District Supt. Edmund L. Kelly said today he has agreed to a Bears proposal to end beer sales after the half-time intermission.
The beer-limiting proposal was made last week, before the arrest early yesterday of Bears coach Mike Ditka on a drunken-driving charge.
Ditka told a press conference yesterday that he was in "complete agreement" with the proposal.
The Bears also said they will turn away obviously drunken fans, giving them a ticket refund at the gate. This can be done without Park District approval.


To book artists and talent such as Bill Acosta for your corporate event, private party, fundraiser, or club, just use our Find Talent Form or Contact us.
Mr. Acosta's endless talents have now been packaged in a Las Vegas Style musical revue. Acosta's kaleidoscope of talent combines the gambit of vocal styles, celebrity impressions and comedy to awe audiences of all ages. Acosta brings to life nearly fifty celebrity voices in each one of his presentations. The most impressive voice displayed, however, will be the crystal clear, powerful tones of Chicago's current claim, BILL ACOSTA.
Whether sharing the stage with Lou Rawls, Patti Labelle, Rodney Dangerfield or Joan Rivers, Acosta's versatility ensures a show to provide many LASTING IMPRESSIONS!
Traveling over 160,000 miles annually, the corporate market keeps Bill Acosta moving! Some corporate clients include, Hewlett Packard, Blockbuster Video, Disney and Northrop Grumman.
Acosta's standard showcase includes straight vocals, 55-60 impressions and comedy to awe audiences of all ages. Mr. Acosta's manager, Jeanne Bavaro states, " His corporate showcases are far from standard! I can't remember a client that we didn't customize a show for. Clients will always want his show stopper, The 12 Days of Christmas and his tribute to Frank Sinatra. We almost always alternate songs and bits to be sure we hit each target market."
Acosta still stays active with the cruise line corporations as well. You may have seen him aboard Holland American, Royal Caribbean, Crystal, Princess, Disney or any of the other 200+ ships he has worked over the past 25 years.
To book an artist such as Bill Acosta or other big name talent for your Corporate Event, Private Party, Fundraiser or Convention, let one of our mediator agents negotiate with managers, agents and artists to achieve the best possible entertainment experience.
Just fill out the Talent Request form for "Bill Acosta", so that one of our experienced professionals can contact and book this artist for you. We make booking entertainment and booking musicians easy! So get started with the preliminary Talent Request form and let us use our negitiating skills to get Bill Acosta booked for your next event.


ST. PAUL, MINN.—(March 11, 2003) - Northwest Airlines today announced a flexible ticketing policy for international travel that provides customers with additional travel and ticketing options in the event of military action.
"Northwest's flexible international ticketing policy allows our customers to purchase travel at extremely attractive fares with the assurance that they can change their travel plans in the event of military action in the Middle East," said Laura Liu, vice president of international revenue management.
* Changing travel scheduled within 90 days of when hostilities commence to an earlier or later date one time without paying any administrative change fees. All return travel must be concluded by December 15, 2003.
* Applying the full value of their original ticket towards the purchase of another ticket on Northwest or KLM, provided that travel is completed by December 15, 2003.
While Northwest will waive the change fee one time, customers will be responsible for any difference in fare and must qualify for all of the requirements of their new fare. Should the new fare be lower, refunds will not be given.
The policy also applies to customers traveling on award tickets related to Northwest's WorldPerks frequent flyer program.
To take advantage of these options, customers must advise their travel agent or Northwest international reservations before their scheduled flight, or within 30 days of military action commencing, whichever occurs first.


Deep within the land of Motorik lies a forgotten place; within its walls exists a forbidden space. Here, wide-eyed boys and tie-dyed girls converge. Under roofed skies and forgotten walls, they taste of the deepest depths of night. This is ACID HAUS. This is MOTORIK. All aboard the bassline express, your mind expanding vibe shamen and shawomen for the evening are THE FINGER PRINCE, CSMNT61, SLOW BLOW, VIVI + LINDA MARIGLIANO. Please keep your hands and feet outside at all times to ensure maximum mind expansion.


text:
By Thomas Pynchon
App Happy
Several recent novels — among them Dave Eggers's The Circle and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge –tackle the effects of social media on our world. The latest, Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen, may be the best of the bunch, writes Andrew Hulktrans. At Bookforum, he explains why Cohen's depiction of an app-saturated world is unparalleled. You could also read Jonathan Frederick Post on Cohen's novel Witz.
The Flamethrowers
The Luminaries
Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
The Lowland
The first six spots in the March Top Ten are unchanged from February, and only two newcomers — Beautiful Ruins and The Circle — managed to crack this month's list. Their arrival was made possible by the ascension of Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge to the hallowed ground of our Millions Hall of Fame.
It may come as a surprise to faithful Millions readers that this is the first time Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins has made our Top Ten. First published in 2012, Walter's novel has been a mainstay in our Year in Reading series ever since. First came the estimable trio of Emma Straub, Roxane Gay, and Robert Birnbaum, who by turns referred to the book as "precise, skilled, quick-witted, and warm-hearted," "one of my favorite books of the year," and "especially special." More recently, Kate Milliken commented on how it seems the entire world has read the book already, and that she was late to the party when she got to it in 2013. Of course, that didn't stop her from diving in, later confirming what others have said all along: "Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is indeed bumpin'."
(If you still need more convincing, then know this: the book is on its way to the big screen, too.)
On the other hand, Dave Eggers's The Circle has hovered outside of the Top Ten ever since Lydia Kiesling identified it as "occup[ying] an awkward place of satire and self-importance." It wasn't the most positive review she's written, but it wasn't altogether negative, either: "There are noble impulses behind this novel — to prophesy, to warn, and to entertain — and it basically delivers on these fronts." And if nothing else, Kiesling notes that the book provides a reliable glossary of "awful techno-cum-Landmark Forum-cum-HR-cum-feelings-speak," which should prove useful for anyone hoping to understand the language of blog posts on TechCrunch, ValleyWag, and other sites devoted to the latest digital secretions from Silicon Valley.
Stay tuned next month for the likely graduation of six titles to our Millions Hall of Fame. Which books will take their places? Will surprises emerge? As with March Madness, the only certainty is uncertainty, so we'll have to wait and see.
Near Misses: Eleanor & Park, Bark: Stories, The Son, The Unwinding, Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines, and The Good Lord Bird. See Also: Last month's list.
The Interestings
No new titles were added to this month's Top Ten, and the four books in the top spots held onto their exact positions from last January. That's to be expected, I suppose, considering the fact that The Goldfinch is everywhere these days, and was also the subject of Claire Cameron's recent Millions piece, "How to Tweet Like Boris from The Goldfinch."
Meanwhile, Alice Munro continues to ride her rightfully-deserved wave of post-Nobel Prize publicity, and her Selected Stories held onto her second-place spot in our list as a result. Still, it may behoove some readers to check out Munro's other works in the coming months, and for guidance in that department, look no further than Ben Dolnick's classic, "Beginner's Guide to Alice Munro." In the event that you've exhausted her bibliography, or you're simply bitten by Maple Fever following Canada's hockey sweep in the Sochi Olympics, you might also want to check out Michael Bourne's essential "Beginner's Guide to Canadian Lit." (The cure for Maple Fever, incidentally, is a serving of Timbits from any Tim Horton's establishment.)
Another item of interest for avid Top Ten fans is the recent debut of Paper Monument's Draw it With Your Eyes Closed supplemental website of the same name, which was developed to "expand on the previously published content, allowing a broader range of teachers, students, and artists to access, share, and contribute to the project."
Rounding out this month's near misses is Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, which surely blipped onto some readers' radars after being nominated for the The L.A. Times Book Prize a few weeks back. That Prize will be awarded on April 11. Ozeki's novel was also featured prominently in our recent comparison of U.S. Vs. U.K. book covers.
Lastly, I'd like to take this moment to announce that I'll be taking the Top Ten reins from now on. My hope is that I can use my experience with the Curiosities blog to supplement each month's list with as much recent news about the books as possible. See you in a few weeks!
Near Misses: The Circle, Eleanor & Park, The Son, The Unwinding, and A Tale for the Time Being. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: January 2014
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for January.
Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame in January. We're very proud to bestow the honor on our ebook original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes. The book, which debuted in July 2013, is an ambitious work of page-turning reportage, the kind of journalism we all crave but that can often be hard to find. Filled with brilliant insights into how scientific discoveries are made and expertly edited by our own Garth Hallberg, The Pioneer Detectives is a bargain at $2.99. We hope you'll pick it up if you haven't already. Pioneer is joined in the Hall of Fame by another ebook orginal, George Saunders's $0.99 short story Fox 8, which returned to our Top 10 for a seventh month in January after missing the list in December and therefore qualifies for the Hall.
Other than that, the list is positively gridlocked with several books staying put, including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch atop the list. Our lone debut is unexepected: Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. The National Book award-winning title has been popular among our readers for quite a while and was a "Near Miss" for several months on our list as recently as March 2011. The book likely got a boost thanks to Garth's mention in his Year in Reading in December.
Incidentally, this also means that with the exception of Thomas Pynchon and the group-authored Draw it With Your Eyes Closed, our list is made up entirely of books by women.
Near Misses: The Circle, Eleanor & Park, The Son, Night Film, and Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: December 2013
C. Max Magee | 1
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for December.
The Pioneer Detectives
To start the new year, we've made some minor changes to how we calculate our list. Basically, we've added a slight penalty for lower-priced books because we were finding that spikes in sales of cheaper short-format books (e.g. "Kindle Singles") and aggressive promotional pricing of ebooks was skewing the list a bit. The change had no dramatic impact on the December list other than that it knocked George Saunders's $0.99 short story Fox 8 out of our top 10.
The rest of the big changes were driven by our 2013 Year in Reading. Some books that were already popular with our readers got a lot of love in the series, including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch which surged into the top spot after three contributors named the book as a favorite read of 2013. Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings was also a popular name in the series, and that helped return the book to the Top Ten after a few months off the list. Rachel Kushner was the runaway favorite in our series for The Flamethrowers, though the book dropped a spot to number three.
Our lone debut is a very unusual title. Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment is a slim collection, the result of several art teachers being asked to contribute the best art assignments they've ever heard of. Hannah Gersen included the book in her list of offbeat gifts for writers last month.
Finally, the contentious Taipei by Tao Lin graduates to our Hall of Fame. The book was the subject of a famously negative review here that perhaps not so paradoxically seemed to get a lot of people interested in the book.
Near Misses: The Circle, Night Film, Eleanor & Park, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, and MaddAddam. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: November 2013
C. Max Magee | 17
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for November.
There wasn't much action on our list November as the top 5 stayed unchanged. Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch was the big mover, jumping from the eighth spot to the sixth.
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson graduates to our illustrious Hall of Fame after a six-month run on the list that was initially spurred by the book's Pulitzer win earlier this year. That departure makes room for the return of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland
Near Misses: Night Film, Visitation Street, The Interestings, MaddAddam and Dear Life. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: October 2013
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for October.
The Orphan Master's Son
In October, we were in the thick of book prize season, and the announcements sent readers running to new books, resulting in a big shake-up on our list, led by new Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. Within minutes of the announcement, readers were finding our "Beginner's Guide to Alice Munro", penned by Ben Dolnick, author of Shelf-Love, an ebook original about Munro. Dolnick called Munro's Selected Stories "the Munro book to read if you're only willing to read one" and he singled out The Beggar Maid as "the Munro book to read if you're only willing to read one but don't like the idea of reading a literary greatest hits album." Many readers took his advice and the former landed atop our list, while the latter ended up in the sixth spot.
Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers continued to win fans (here at The Millions, for example; we also interviewed her), but it was the book's landing on the National Book Award shortlist that rocketed it to the second spot on our list.
There was also the Booker Prize. Fresh off a rave review here at The Millions, Eleanor Catton took home the Booker, and her big novel landed at #5 on our list.
And the last of our several debuts is Donna Tartt's long-awaited The Goldfinch. No surprise there.
All these new books bumped five names from our list, collected here as this month's Near Misses: Night Film, The Lowland, The Interestings, Visitation Street and MaddAddam. See Also: Last month's list.
2013 National Book Award Shortlists Released
The contenders for the 2013 National Book Award were pared down to a five nominees in each category today. Winners will be announced in New York City on November 20.
Fans of Jhumpa Lahiri will be excited to know that after missing out on yesterday's Man Booker Prize, the Lowland author is still squarely in the running for the National Book Award. Of course, in order to attain the honor she's going to have to beat out former Millions Top Ten member George Saunders and Millions favorite Rachel Kushner – as well as previous NBA winner Thomas Pynchon. On the nonfiction list, Millions readers should recognize George Packer's The Unwinding, which Chris Barsanti called an "awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul."
At the final awards ceremony on November 20, each finalist will receive $1,000, and each winner will receive an additional $10,000. Additional awards will also be goven to E.L. Doctorow and Maya Angelou, who will be receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community, respectively. The National Book Foundation has also announced that free e-books will be released containing excerpts from each of the works on the shortlist. (We'll have more on that when it's available.) Edit: The new e-books are now available for the Fiction Finalists, Nonfiction Finalists, Poetry Finalists, and Young People's Literature Finalists. (E-books for other platforms are available here.)
Here's a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (Millions review, Millions interview)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (excerpt)
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (excerpt)
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (first page, excerpt)
Tenth of December by George Saunders (Millions review)
Nonfiction:
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore (review)
Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (Millions review)
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 by Alan Taylor (review)
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright (review, excerpt)
Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart (review)
Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido (review)
The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka (excerpt)
Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen
Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (review)
Young People's Literature:
The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt (review)
The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata (review)
Far Far Away by Tom McNeal
Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang (review)
The Millions Top Ten: September 2013
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for September.
Night Film
MaddAddam
This month our second ebook original The Pioneer Detectives moves into the top spot as the book continues to garner very positive reviews from readers. We hope you'll pick it up if you haven't already.
Meanwhile, our list sees a big shake up as three books graduate to our Hall of Fame:
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: Ben Fountain's book won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Fountain appeared in our Year in Reading, and Edan Lepucki interviewed him in these pages last June.
Stand on Zanzibar: Ted Gioia penned a very popular piece about the remarkably prescient predictions contained within John Brunner's book and readers ran to check it out.
The Middlesteins: Author Jami Attenberg made an appearance in our Year in Reading in December.
These graduates make room for three heavy-hitting debuts, all of which appeared in our big second-half preview: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (don't miss Atwood's appearance in our Year in Reading; we haven't quite tracked down Pynchon yet for this), and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Near Misses: Vampires in the Lemon Grove, The Flamethrowers, Life After Life, They Don't Dance Much and Telex from Cuba. See Also: Last month's list.
2013 National Book Award Longlists Released
This year the National Book Award finalists were released in a series of four longlists consisting of ten books apiece. Five finalists in each category will be selected by October 16, and winners will be announced in New York City on November 20.
Last year, the fiction finalists included far more male authors than female, however the count is even in 2013. Millions readers will be delighted to find George Saunders's latest story collection on the fiction list. The former Top Ten member was reviewed on our site last May. Saunders is joined by Rachel Kushner, whose second novel "operates outside — above? — many of the current arguments about the novel," according to our own Bill Morris. Likewise, Millions readers should be familiar with George Packer's "awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul" on the nonfiction list.
Pacific by Tom Drury (excerpt)
The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver (excerpt)
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (excerpt)
Someone by Alice McDermott (excerpt)
Fools by Joan Silber (Millions interview)
Finding Florida: The True Story of the Sunshine State by T.D. Allman (excerpt, audiobook excerpt)
Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich (excerpt)
The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA by Scott C. Johnson (excerpt)
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 by James Oakes (review)
Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (review)
Bury My Clothes by Roger Bonair-Agard (excerpt)
So Recently Rent a World, New and Selected Poems: 1968–2012 by Andrei Codrescu (interview)
Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire by Brenda Hillman (author reading)
American Amnesiac by Diane Raptosh (excerpt)
Transfer of Qualities by Martha Ronk
Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by K.G. Campbell (review)
A Tangle of Knots by Lisa Graff (excerpt)
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson (review, excerpt, audiobook excerpt)
The Real Boy by Anne Ursu, illustrated by Erin McGuire
Try Finding a Picture
Here's an odd scenario straight out of a Thomas Pynchon plotline: in the course of fact-checking a review of Pynchon's new novel, Alex Yuhas found himself emailing a person known only as "The Great Quail."
Tuesday New Release Day: Pynchon, Baker, McNair, Boccaccio
Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge, which we covered in several Curiosities, is out this week. Also out: Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker; Pickett's Charge by Charles McNair; and a new translation of Boccaccio's Decameron by UT-Austin professor Wayne Rebhorn. (For more on these and other upcoming titles, check out our Great 2013 Second-half Book Preview.)
He Is Not Pynchon
Penguin released a book trailer for the newest Thomas Pynchon novel in which a guy in a T-shirt that reads "I'm Pynchon" stands on a rooftop on the "Yupper" West Side and talks about his life. (To find out why I used the term "Yupper," check out the recent New York mag piece on Pynchon that I wrote about last week.)
Yupper Class
The release date for Thomas Pynchon's new novel is three weeks away, and to mark the occasion, Boris Kachka runs through a quick biography of the perpetually mysterious author. Among other things, Kachka points out that Pynchon resides in a fairly odd neighborhood for a recluse to choose to live in — the Upper West Side. (Previously: "Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel" and "New Thomas Pynchon Teaser.")
The first half of 2013 delighted us with new books by the likes of George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Colum McCann, among many others. And if the last six months had many delights on offer for book lovers, the second half of the year can only be described as an invitation to gluttony. In the next six months, you'll see new books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl, Norman Rush, Jonathan Lethem, and none other than Thomas Pynchon. And beyond those headliners there are many other tantalizing titles in the wings, including some from overseas and others from intriguing newcomers.
The list that follows isn't exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 9,000 words strong and encompassing 86 titles, this is the only second-half 2013 book preview you will ever need. Scroll down and get started.
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda: Crime writer Dennis Lehane chose Pochoda's lyrical and atmospheric second novel for his eponymous imprint at Ecco/Harper, calling it "gritty and magical." Pitched as a literary thriller about the diverse inhabitants of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Visitation Street has already received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal. Lionel Shriver says, "I loved it," and Deborah Harkness calls it "marvelous." (Edan)
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff: Rakoff was the author of three books of essays, the winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and a beloved regular on This American Life who died last year shortly after finishing this book. A novel written entirely in verse (a form in which he was masterful, as evidenced here), its characters range across the 20th century, each connected to the next by an act of generosity or cruelty. (Janet)
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman: Waldman recently weighed in for us on the centuries-old Richardson vs. Fielding debate. Now, in her first novel, she expertly plays the former's psychological penetration off the latter's civic vision. The titular Nathaniel, one of Brooklyn's sad young literary men, seeks to navigate between his public ambitions and his private compulsions in a series of romantic encounters. Those without 718 area codes shouldn't let the milieu scare them off; questions of whether Nate can heed the difficult imperatives of the conscience—and of how Waldman will pull off a whole book from the man's point of view—keep the pages turning, while generating volumes of quotable insight, in the manner of The Marriage Plot. (Garth)
Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine: A country mouse moves to the city in Cathleen Schine's ninth novel. The mouse is Fin, an orphaned eleven-year old boy, and the city is Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Under the guardianship of his glamorous half-sister, Lady, Fin gets to know both the city and his wild sister, and encounters situations that are a far cry from his Connecticut dairy farm upbringing. As with many of Schine's previous novels, Fin & Lady explores changing definitions of family. (Hannah)
My Education by Susan Choi: Reflect upon your sordid graduate school days with a novel of the perverse master-student relationship and adulterous sex triangle. Professor Brodeur is evidently the kind of man whose name is scrawled on restroom walls by vengeful English majors—rather than end up in the sack with him, Choi's protagonist Regina instead starts up an affair with his wife. Later in the novel and in time, Regina reflects on this period in her life and the changes wrought by the intervening 15 years. Choi was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her second novel, American Woman. (Lydia)
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw: The third novel from the winner of the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award follows the lives and business ventures of five characters in Shanghai, each representing various—and at times dichotomous—social strata. There's Phoebe, the poor and unsophisticated migrant worker from Malaysia; and there's Yinghui, the rich and ambitious businesswoman. There's Gary, the waylaid pop star; and there's Justin, the scion of a wealthy real estate family. Lastly there's Walter, the eponymous billionaire, who meddles behind the scenes with the lives of almost everybody. Altogether, their multi-layered, intersecting lives contribute to make "Shanghai itself [into] the book's real main character," writes Jill Baker in the Asian Review of Books. It's a city "luring in people hoping for a second chance or … any chance at all." (Nick)
Lotería by Mario Alberto Zambrano: It's a rare first novel that can appeal to partisans of both S.E. Hinton and Julio Cortázar, but Lotería does just that. The story 11-year-old Luz Maria Castillo begins telling us from her room in a state institution is deceptively plainspoken: Here's how I got here. But as the story proceeds in fragments, keyed not to chronology but to a deck of cards from Lotería (a kind of Mexican bingo), things get shiftier. Color reproductions of the cards introduce each chapter, making the book, if not exactly Kindle-proof, then at least uncommonly handsome. (Garth)
The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth: Gabriel Roth's debut novel follows Eric Muller from his lonely high school days as a computer geek to his millionaire success in Silicon Valley as a computer geek. Slightly disoriented by his newfound abilities to make money and bed women, Muller wryly observes his life as if he is that same awkward teenager trapped in a dream life. When he falls in love with Maya, a beautiful woman with a mysterious past, he must choose between the desire to emotionally (and literally) hack into it, or to trust his good fortune. (Janet)
The Hare by César Aira: A recent bit of contrarianism in The New Republic blamed the exhaustive posthumous marketing of Roberto Bolaño for crowding other Latin American writers out of the U.S. marketplace. If anything, it seems to me, it's the opposite: the success of The Savage Detectives helped publishers realize there was a market for Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the fascinating Argentine César Aira. The past few years have seen seven of Aira's many novels translated into English. Some of them, like Ghosts, are transcendently good, but none has been a breakout hit. Maybe the reissue of The Hare, which appeared in the U.K. in 1998, will be it. At the very least, it's the longest Aira to appear in English: a picaresque about a naturalist's voyage into the Argentinean pampas. (Garth)
Night Film by Marisha Pessl: Pessl's first novel since Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her celebrated 2006 debut, concerns a David Lynchish filmmaker whose daughter has died in Lower Manhattan under suspicious circumstances. Soon, reporter Scott McGrath has launched an investigation that will take him to the heart of the auteur's secretive empire: his cult following, his whacked-out body of work, and his near impenetrable upstate compound. With interpolated web pages and documents and Vanity Fair articles, the novel's a hot pop mess, but in the special way of a latter-day Kanye West album or a movie co-directed by Charlie Kaufman and Michael Bay, and the climax alone—a 65-page haunted-house tour-de-force—is worth the price of admission. (Garth)
Cannonball by Joseph McElroy: McElroy was writing the lights out in the '70s and early '80s, and in the last few years has been rediscovered by a younger generation of readers, who justly class him with Thomas Pynchon—a writer of a wildly different sensibility, but a similar, world-devouring ambition. Hell, he even did a Year in Reading. If 2011's Night Soul is any indication, McElroy's can still intrigue, baffle, and stop the heart, often all at once. This, his first novel in many a moon, concerns the Iraq War, among other things, and it's hard to think of an author more suited to reimagining the subject. (Garth)
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat: The author of a string of heartbreaking novels about the strife-torn Caribbean nation of Haiti, including The Farming of Bones and The Dew Breaker, Danticat here tells the story of a young motherless girl whose poverty-stricken father considers giving her away a wealthier family. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel," the novel paints a stark portrait of village life in Haiti. (Michael)
Remember How I Told You I Loved You? by Gillian Linden: Gillian Linden's debut collection of linked stories follows a young woman through college, careers, love affairs and marriages— "from delayed adolescence to (delayed) adulthood." The publisher, Little A (Amazon's new literary fiction imprint), describes the collection as "a sharp and intimate take on romance and infidelity, trust and betrayal," written in a "deadpan narrative, cool and precise." Linden's story "Pests" was recently published in The Paris Review. Linden will join the ranks of several talented literary writers that Little A has published since its launch in March — including A.L. Kennedy, Shawn Vestal, and Jenny Davidson. (Sonya)
The Infatuations by Javier Marias: Marias's only competitor for the title of Spain's Most Important Living Writer may be Enrique Vila-Matas. Each of his last few books with New Directions, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, set a new high-water mark—most recently, the mammoth trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. Now he's made the jump to Knopf, which means you're about to hear a lot about him. And deservedly so, it would seem: The Infatuations has already been called "great literature" in Spain and "perhaps his best novel" in the U.K. Is there any reason on earth you wouldn't want to read the greatest novel of Spain's greatest living writer? Of course there isn't. Now get thee to a bookshop! (Garth)
The Color Master by Aimee Bender: Ogres, tiger-mending and playing at prostitution—yep, it's time for Aimee Bender to once again enchant us with her whimsical and magical fiction. Her next story collection comes out just three years after the publication of her bestselling novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and it looks like the book is a return to form for Bender. Publishers Weekly says that even the tales that resemble children's storybooks "are haunted by a taut, sardonic melancholy," noting that her "mood pieces" about female friendship are the strongest of the bunch. (Edan)
Elect H. Mouse State Judge by Nelly Reifler: To Kafka's "Josephine, the Mouse-Singer" and Bolaño's "Police Rat" and Mrs. Frisby and that one A.M. Homes story where the kid gets it on with a Barbie doll, we must now add Nelly Reifler's first novel. It's a fast-paced caper—politician's kids get abducted, private eyes go searching—but with a major twist: H. Mouse is a mouse, and both perps and dicks are dolls. Shrewdly, Reifler serves this concoction neat; what could have been cheap thrills give way to weirder and more surprising effects. (Garth)
The Rathbones by Janice Clark: The Rathbones is the most sui generis debut you're likely to encounter this year. Think Moby-Dick directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez…with Charles Addams doing the set design and The Decembrists supplying the chanteys. Initially the story of the last surviving member of an eccentric 19th-Century whaling dynasty, it becomes the story of that dynasty itself. I should also say that this was the single most exciting thing I read in manuscript in graduate school, where the author and I studied together. Clark writes a beautiful prose line, and the story, like the ocean, get deeper, richer, and stranger the farther out you go. (Garth)
A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories by Robert Walser: For a long time, Walser addicts—which is to say, pretty much anyone who has come into contact with this intoxicating writer—had to make do with the novel Jakob van Gunten (but what a novel!) and a slim edition of selected stories. But, half a century after his death, the Swiss master of smallness and obscurity is finally getting the treatment he deserves. Microscripts was one of the best books I read in 2012. The tireless Susan Bernofsky has also given us versions of The Tanners, The Assistant, and a collection of Berlin Stories. In this volume, Damion Searls translates a group of stories about school life—also the engine of much of Jakob van Gunten's exquisite comedy. (Garth)
Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain: Lately, it's seemed that the "literary" first novel had become a genre unto itself: a certain page-limit, a certain definition of scope, a certain set of problems, modestly conceived and modestly transcended. If so, Crain's stately, wry, and generous first novel breaks the mold. Certainly, there's a classic coming-of-age narrative here. But as the back-cover blurbs attest, the adventures of American Jacob Putnam in Czechoslovakia right after the Iron Curtain's fall recall Henry James as much as they do Ben Lerner. Crain's broad social canvas and his deep interest in the lives of other people are marks of distinction. (Garth)
The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800) by Steven Moore: The first volume of Moore's magisterial survey advanced a theory of the novel as inherently experimental and multicultural, and much older than is generally acknowledged. It's not that Jane Austen moves to the margins and Gertrude Stein to the center, but that Austen and Stein become recognizably part of the same story. And though Moore hews closer, necessarily, to synopsis than to close-reading, his project is an invaluable desk reference for the catholic reader. In volume 2, he turns his sights to the era that inspired the argument in the first place, a period that begins with Don Quixote. (Garth)
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: At The Age, Cameron Woodhead writes: "With The Sound of Things Falling, Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has created a story that can be appreciated purely for the dramatic way it dives into the black hole of his country's past—the drug cartels and paramilitaries that scarred a generation—although the supple thought-weave of the prose won't be lost on anyone with a taste for more reflective fiction." Woodhead also compares Vasquez to Graham Greene, W.G. Sebald, and Robert Bolaño—all writers who give us an expansive sense of a country's history and legacy through the lives of compelling individuals. The protagonist is a Colombian lawyer named Antonio whose memory takes him back to a long-ago acquaintance with the ex-pilot Ricardo LaVerde and a series of mysterious (and yes, violent) occurrences. Vásquez, who is 40, has published four previous novels, but prefers to not count the first two, which he wrote in his early 20s; so "officially," Sound is his third novel. (Sonya)
The Virgins by Pamela Erens: This smart, unsettling novel is narrated by a middle-aged man obsessed by the star-crossed love affair of two classmates at his boarding school thirty years ago. Erens, author of one previous novel, The Understory, displays an uncanny gift for writing honestly about pot-toking, hormone-addled adolescents while granting them the full range of human emotion one expects from a novel for adults. The novel is from indie press Tin House Books, a spinoff of the well-known literary magazine that has quietly built a reputation as a home for first-rate literary fiction. (Michael)
The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood: Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of British journalist Serena Mackesy, and The Wicked Girls is her dark and beautifully executed first novel. In the mid-eighties, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time and become friends. By the end of the day, a younger child has died at their hands. Twenty-five years later, with new lives and changed identities, the two women encounter one another in a seaside town where a serial killer is active. A haunting meditation on crime and punishment. (Emily)
The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd: Loyd, formerly the fiction editor at Playboy, moves to the other side of the desk with a first novel of elegant intensity. A young widow in Brooklyn has bought her apartment building, and so become an accidental landlord. Or do people still say landlady? At any rate, her straitened existence is challenged by the arrival of a fascinating new tenant, with emotional transformation the ultimate issue. Loyd's burnished, spare sentences conceal hidden volumes of emotion, and in its different moods, the book may put readers in mind of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland or of a more hopeful version of Claire Messud's recent The Woman Upstairs. (Garth)
Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: Sayrafiezadeh's acclaimed memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, chronicled a childhood being raised by an Iranian father and American Jewish mother united by an extreme devotion to the Socialist Workers Party. Three years later, Sayrafiezadeh, whose fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other places, publishes his first short story collection. The everyday trials of his characters, some of them grappling with the rippling effects of a nameless war ("this could be any war, or perhaps the next war," Sayrafiezadeh told The New Yorker) "are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange." (Elizabeth)
The Hypothetic Girl by Elizabeth Cohen: From Other Press, a collection of stories that "captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection" via tales about the bizarre and inarguably ubiquitous world of online dating. Says Amazon: "With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird." For anyone who's been submerged in this wonderful weird search, these stories are likely to ring a therapeutic bell. Or, in some cases perhaps, a gong. Look out for an essay from Cohen in July, and an excerpt in early August, at Bloom. (Sonya)
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam concludes the dystopian trilogy that Atwood began ten years ago with Oryx and Crake and continued in 2009 with The Year of the Flood. Booklist calls MaddAddam a "coruscating finale in an ingenious, cautionary trilogy of hubris, fortitude, wisdom, love, and life's grand obstinacy." (Emily)
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon: Since his 1997 comeback, Pynchon's been uncommonly productive…and, more characteristically, all over the map. I thought Mason & Dixon his best book; Against the Day vastly underrated; and Inherent Vice fun but disposable. Proximity to the present moment can be a telling index of the quality of a Pynchon project, so the setting here—New York's Silicon Alley on the eve of the dot-com crash—gives one pause. But Pynchon's ability to "think the present historically" in his last two books was the best thing about them, so maybe he still has much to tell us about the way we live now. (Garth)
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King: Thirty-six years later, it's here: a sequel to The Shining. Dan Torrance, the tricycle peddling protagonist of the original horror classic, is now middle-age and working in a nursing home in New Hampshire where he uses his ebbing mental powers to comfort the dying. The story picks up when Dan tries to save Abra Stone, a twelve-year-old girl with gifts like the ones he used to have, who is in danger from a group called The True Knot, which travels the country consuming children with the gift of The Shining. (Kevin)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's second novel (and fourth book) comes heaped with expectations and describes the relationship between two formerly inseparable brothers born in mid-century Calcutta. The first, Udayan, is drawn into revolutionary politics; the second, Subash, leaves his native country to make a better life for himself as a scientist in the United States. But tragedy strikes Udayan and Subash returns home where he gets to know Udayan's former wife and reconnects with childhood memories. (Kevin)
Someone by Alice McDermott: An excerpt of Alice McDermott's new novel, Someone, appeared in the New Yorker as a story of the same name. The story is about Marie, who is seventeen years old in 1937, when a boy from her Brooklyn neighborhood turns her head, fondles her breast, promises marriage, and then spurns her for a better-looking girl. In the story, the titular Someone is the person who, Marie's brother promises, will one day love her. McDermott told The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman that the novel is the story of "one unremarkable woman," because "novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past." Who you calling "unremarkable," Alice McDermott? (Lydia)
Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai: In the last few years, American readers have rapidly awakened to Krasznahorkai's important place in the republic of world letters. He is one of few working novelists who still aspires to mastery, in the Modernist sense, and each of the three previous novels translated into English has been a masterpiece. Those books were set in Europe and New York. Seiobo, published in Hungarian in 2009, reveals a different side of the Krasznahorkai oeuvre: his decades-long engagement with East Asia. It's a major feat of editing and translating, and the publication date been pushed back. Those who can't wait should check out the excerpt in Music & Literature. (Garth)
Enon by Paul Harding: Harding's 2009 debut, Tinkers, won him the Pulitzer Prize and instant acclaim as one of the most profound writers of our time. Enon follows Charlie Crosby, the grandson of Tinkers protagonist George Washington Crosby, through a year of his life after a devastating loss. Inhabiting the same New England landscape so intricately rendered in Tinkers (Enon is the town where George Crosby died), Enon is a story about small moment and big questions. (Janet)
John Updike: The Collected Stories by John Updike: This two-volume collection spans the arc of a life's work. One hundred and eighty-six stories are presented in their final versions and in definitive order of composition, established for the first time by archival research: from "Ace in the Hole" (1953), written when Updike was still a student at Harvard, to "The Full Glass" from 2008, the final year of his life. In his poem "Spirit of '76," written during his final illness and published in The New Yorker three months after his death, Updike wrote:
I see clear through to the ultimate page,
the silence I dared break for my small time.
No piece was easy, but each fell finished,
in its shroud of print, into a book-shaped hole. (Emily)
Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta: American fiction's favorite lighthearted chronicler of suburban angst delivers his first collection of short stories since Bad Haircut, his first book, nineteen years ago. In Nine Inches, Perrotta, the author of the Hollywood-friendly novels Little Children and The Leftovers (currently under development as a HBO series), returns to familiar themes of fractured families and the undercurrent of disappointment that lurks just below the placid surface of suburban life. Perrotta knows his way around a punch line, so expect some chuckles to go along with your quiet desperation. (Michael)
The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: When it came out in the UK and Ireland this Spring, Coetzee's new novel was received with an even more potent combination of admiration and confusion than his work is normally met with. Reviewing the book in the Telegraph, Michael Preston asked whether it was "possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it's about?" (The fairly obvious answer: yes.) A man and a five year old boy arrive in a sort of refugee camp, where they are assigned new names and ages. The boy speaks in riddles and claims to be able to perform miracles. Together, they search for the boy's mother, and endure a series of odd bureaucratic encounters. The inscrutable spirit of Kafka has often flickered across Coetzee's pages, and that spirit seems to loom large here. (Mark)
The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell: Daniel Woodrell, a master of "country noir" fiction, makes rare use of autobiography in his new novel, The Maid's Version. While growing up in West Plains, Missouri, Woodrell listened to stories his grandmother told about a mysterious dance hall explosion in town in 1928 that killed 39 people. In the novel, a grandmother tells her grandson about working as a maid for the family that was implicated in the blast but never held responsible. The novel is "very lyrical and not completely chronological," Woodrell told an interviewer, "because it's the story of a family and the after-effects on the family and the grandmother trying to get justice or revenge." (Bill)
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes: Julian Barnes's new book is not a novel, and not a memoir, and not a collection of essays, although it appears to contain elements of all three. The collection begins with a brief history of hot air ballooning and the characters involved in its development and lured by its attractions. Part two is an imagined romance between Sarah Bernhardt, who was in life one of the people from the latter category, and Colonel Frederick Burnaby, intrepid ballooner (who is, incidentally, documented on the delightful website "Great British Nutters"). In the third part of his new book, Barnes ties these curious introductory portions into a memoir of his profound grief following the loss of Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years. (Lydia)
Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker: Last year, Nicholson Baker treated the Internet to a cluster of peculiar, melancholy protest songs about Bradley Manning and the Obama administration's drone assassination program. The venture was out of character in a way that was, weirdly, entirely characteristic of Baker. The songs appear to have been, at least in part, an aspect of a method writing exercise for his new novel, Traveling Sprinkler—a sort of sequel to 2009's The Anthologist, in which Paul Chowder sat around having a lot of thoughts about poetry while failing to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. In the new novel, Chowder sits around trying to write protest songs. Very few writers are as interesting as Baker on the theme of men sitting (or standing) around, so this looks promising. (Mark)
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem: Of the greats of his generation, Lethem is one of the few who's gotten steadily better, novel by novel. Fortress of Solitude is a better book than Motherless Brooklyn, and in my read, Chronic City is even better than that—the highs less high, but the consistency more consistent. It's also worth noting that Lethem's always been a political writer (science-fiction being among other things a way of thinking about the possible) and has been more so lately. Expectations for Dissident Gardens, then—a generation-spanning saga centered around Leftists from Sunnyside Queens—should be very, very high. (Garth)
Mood Indigo by Boris Vian: Few of Vian's novels have been translated, but L'Ecume des Jours is appearing in English for the third time, with a third title (Mood Indigo, Froth on the Daydream, Foam of the Daze, take your pick). Still, we should be grateful for what we are given—Le Monde named L'Ecume number 10 on the 100 best books of the century. Vian (d. 1959), published under his own name and the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. He was a trumpeter in the Hot Club de France, devotee of Duke Ellington, ingester of peyote, consort of Sartre (until Sartre consorted with his wife). Written in 1947, L'Ecume is a sad, fanciful love story (which, the Harvard Crimson wrote in 1969, read like "perceptions at a stoned-soul picnic," in a good way). Mood Indigo received the Michel Gondry film treatment last spring. (Lydia)
Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush: The decade-in-the-making follow-up to Mortals (one of our Best Novels of the Millennium) is also a departure. The first of Rush's books not set in Botswana, it's shorter by half than either of his previous novels, and when I got a galley in the mail, the jacket copy—comfortable fortysomethings at a Big Chill-style reunion near the start of the Iraq War—made me even more nervous. Was the Rush magic still there? Then my wife started reading it, then started putting it down to laugh, and finally began forcing me to listen to her read whole passages aloud for the sheer pleasure of the phrases. Note to Mr. Rush: You had me at "berserk industry." (Garth)
His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon: A 600-page depiction of a jilted lover's interior thoughts might not be your idea of an enjoyable book, but in the hands of a writer as talented as Stephen Dixon, it's certainly one worth reading. In his own description of the novel, he's noted that it's about "a bunch of nouns" such as "love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving." Indeed these words convey the complexity of a life rendered whole, of a relationship's threads and effects laid bare, and of honest memories enlivened by an acute and unrelenting ache. When a relationship dies, all that remains are remembered details, and in the words of Jim Harrison, "death steals everything except our stories." (Nick)
Local Souls by Allan Gurganus: For his first book in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the imagined town of Falls, N.C., where he set his first and best-known novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His new book, Local Souls, which owes more to Flannery O'Connor than to Nikolai Gogol, is three linked novellas set in the contemporary New South, with its air-conditioning and improved telecommunications, its freer sexuality and looser family ties. However, some old habits prove hard to break—including adultery, incest and obsession—in these tales that unfold in a Dixiefied version of Winesburg, Ohio. (Bill)
Between Friends by Amos Oz: Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz spent three decades living on a kibbutz because city life was not "radical" enough for him and, as he puts it in his new book of stories, Between Friends, he wanted to live among "people with patience and doubts and compassion." These eight stories, set in the imaginary Kibbutz Yikhat during the 1950s of Oz's youth, spin around the shortcomings of idealism and the fragility of all utopias. In the end, the stories affirm Oz's long-held belief that both on the kibbutz and throughout the larger Middle East, the only hope lies not in conflict, but in compromise. (Bill)
The Brunist Day by Robert Coover: Aside from being a terrific year for first novels, 2013 may be remembered for its efflorescence of major work from the eminences grises of postmodernism. So far, we've gotten Gass's Middle C, Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, and McElroy's Cannonball. Now Coover, author of a couple of the great postwar novels (e.g., The Public Burning), returns with a thousand-page sequel to his very first book, The Origin of the Brunists. I haven't been this excited to read new Coover…well, since I started reading Coover. The folks at Dzanc Books should be commended. (Garth)
Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway: This isn't the story of a family business, à la Dombey & Son, but rather a buddy-cop detective vehicle—except the cops aren't exactly buddies, and most of what gets detected is random violence and existential unease. Ridgway is a brilliant stylist from Ireland, and the early word from the U.K. is that he's hit his stride here, in a kind of deadpan avant-pop tour of contemporary London. (Garth)
Duplex by Kathryn Davis: Davis's earlier novel, The Thin Place, is set in a place where the membrane between the real world and the spirit world is extremely thin. Most of her work, which includes six previous novels, sits at this same juncture, combining real and imagined worlds. Duplex is the story of Mary and Eddie, two children growing up in a duplex outside time, while "adulthood"—a world of sorcerers, robots, and slaves—looms ahead. (Janet)
Goat Mountain by David Vann: In his writing across a variety of forms—short stories, novels, memoir, and reportage—David Vann has returned repeatedly to the same deep well of themes: nature, thwarted masculinity, family, and violence. In his third novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy goes on a deer-hunt with his father and grandfather, and things, as they tend to do this writer's work, take a devastating turn. There's a rawness and obsessional urgency to Vann's writing that makes this ongoing project of recasting and development among the most compelling in contemporary literature. (Mark)
At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick: Dolnick's third novel is about a dark secret that tears apart a boyhood friendship and how the two are brought back together as adults to reckon with what happened long ago. The jacket copy calls it "a tale of spiritual reckoning, of search and escape, of longing and reaching for redemption—a tale of near hallucinatory power." Dolnick, who writes for NPR and the New York Times, has also written a Kindle single called Shelf-Love, about his fanaticism for Alice Munro. (Edan)
The Traymore Rooms by Norm Sibum: Poet Norm Sibum's 700-pager should be on the radar of all the maximalism-starved readers who landed A Naked Singularity on our Top 10 list in 2012—though the book might more rightly be likened to something by William Gass or Alexander Theroux. Plot isn't Sibum's thing, exactly, but his erudition (considerable), sense of character (eccentric), and mood (quietly splenetic) more than compensate. The novel concerns a group of aging friends who share haunts in downtown Montreal. They talk, fight, love, and try to make sense of a historical moment that has disappointed their youthful hopes. And apart from an overreliance on that contemporary workhorse, the absolute phrase, the prose is a consistent pleasure. (Garth)
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Tartt said she couldn't "think of anything worse than having to turn out a book every year. It would be hell." She seems to have settled into a pattern of turning out a book every ten or eleven years instead. In her third novel, The Goldfinch, a young boy named Theo Decker survives an accident that kills his mother. In the years that follow, he finds himself drawn to things that remind him of her, including a painting that draws him eventually into the art underworld. (Emily)
Identical by Scott Turow: Every three years, with metronome-like regularity, bestselling lawyer-author Scott Turow comes out with another well-turned legal thriller set in corruption-rife Kindle County. Three years after 2010's Innocent, Turow is right on schedule with a new thriller focusing on a pair of identical twins, one a candidate for mayor in Kindle County, the other a convicted murderer just released from prison after serving 25 years for killing his girlfriend. This is Turow country, so nothing is as it seems and the plot turns on a re-investigation of the decades-old murder that sent one of the brothers to prison. (Michael)
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: Elizabeth Gilbert's return to fiction (she wrote that little-known memoir called Eat Pray Love) is a sprawling historical novel about Alma Whittaker, the daughter of a botanical explorer, and talented scientist in her own right, and her relationship with Utopian artist Ambrose Pike. As the jacket copy says, "Alma Whittaker is a witness to history, as well as maker of history herself." The book spans the globe and two centuries, and it sounds like a big and exciting artistic departure for Gilbert. (Edan)
Solo (James Bond) by William Boyd: At this year's London Book Fair, venerated author William Boyd announced the one-word title of his forthcoming James Bond novel, which reflects the spy's solitary and unauthorized mission. The book is an authorized sequel to Jeffery Deaver's novel, Carte Blanche, published in 2011. At the Book Fair, Boyd said that key action takes place in Africa, the US and Europe, and remarked that Bond "goes on a real mission to real countries and the world he's in is absolutely 1969. There are no gimmicks, it's a real spy story." (Edan)
Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III: The four interlocking stories within Andre Dubus III's sixth book explore the "bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love." These highs and lows are depicted by Mark, a Massachusetts man who's recently discovered his wife's infidelity; by Marla, an overweight young woman who's just found a lover; by Robert, who's just betrayed his pregnant wife; and by Devon, a teenager terrorized by a dirty picture she's posted online, and whose story comprises the collection's titular novella. (Nick)
Cartwheel by Jennifer DuBois: Jennifer DuBois follows her decorated first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, with Cartwheel, a novel with loud echoes of the recent murder trial, conviction and eventual acquittal of Amanda Knox. Cartwheel's protagonist, Lily Hayes, is an American arriving in Buenos Aires for a semester abroad. Five weeks later she's the prime suspect in her roommate's brutal murder. Questions arise. Is Lily guilty? More importantly, exactly who is Lily Hayes? "Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page," the publisher promises, "and its questions about how much we really know about ourselves will linger well beyond." (Bill)
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna: Aminatta Forna made her name with The Devil That Danced on the Water, her memoir about her father's execution for treason in Sierra Leone. In her new novel, The Hired Man, a naive middle-class Englishwoman named Laura arrives with her two teenage children in the Croatian town of Gost, planning to renovate an old house. She enlists the help of an introspective handyman named Duro, and before long the haunted memories of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s come bubbling up from the past. Ill-equipped to understand the dark local history, Laura will come to see that there is great power in overcoming the thirst for revenge. (Bill)
Heart of Darkness (Illustrated) by Matt Kish: In October 2011, Tin House books published Matt Kish's Moby Dick in Pictures, with artwork for each page of text taken from the Signet Classic Paperback. Now, Heart of Darkness will get similar treatment, although this project has 100 illustrations to Moby Dick's 552. The New York Post showcased some wonderful images from the upcoming publication. Matt Kish, a librarian by day, prefers "illustrator" to "artist," he says, "There's a lot of artists out there, they're real assholes, and if you haven't gone to art school, if you haven't had an MFA, if you haven't had a gallery show, if you cant put together some rambling artist statement, you're not worthy of that term." Looks like art to me. (Lydia)
Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips: The creepy-sounding plot of Jayne Anne Phillips's fifth novel is based on a true-life 1930s story of a con man who insinuated himself into the life of a young, impoverished widow only to murder her and her three children. Like Phillips's previous novel, Lark & Termite (a 2009 National Book Award Finalist), parts of the story are set in rural West Virginia, where Phillips herself is from. With a reporter protagonist who sets out to investigate the crime after the fact, there are shades of In Cold Blood. (Hannah)
At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón: Peruvian native Daniel Alarcón's stories thrive on equal parts revolution and spectacle, as evidenced in his first collection, War by Candlelight, as well as in his first novel, Lost City Radio, where the emcee of a popular radio show reunites loved ones separated during a recent civil war. In At Night We Walk in Circles, the Whiting Award-winning Best Young American Novelist draws inspiration from stories told to him by prisoners jailed in Lima's largest prison. Alarcón again situates his novel in a South American state, where the protagonist flounders until he's cast in a revival of touring play penned the leader of a guerilla theatre troupe. (Anne)
The Last Animal by Abby Geni: This debut collection of short stories is thematically linked by characters who "use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss and family life." Geni, who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a winner of the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, has received early praise from Dan Chaon, who says, "These are sharp, incisive, thoughtful, and utterly original stories" and from Jim Gavin, who calls these stories "Haunting and beautiful." (Edan)
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by Claudia Roth Pierpont: Is it strange that an author many wouldn't hesitate to call the greatest living American writer has yet to be the subject of a major critical work? Pierpont remedies this with a book described as "not a biography…but something more rewarding: an attempt to understand a great writer through his art." The New Yorker staff writer should prove a fascinating non-biographer: her previous book was Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, and while her current subject has been accused of sexism many times throughout his long career, David Remnick reported that at a celebration of Roth's eightieth birthday in March, Pierpont "took it upon herself to survey the variety, depth, and complexity of Roth's female characters — a strong, and convincing, rebuke to years of criticism that the books are misogynistic." (Elizabeth)
How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman: Former Granta editor John Freeman's first book, The Tyranny of Email, considered the ways that email collapsed great distances between us. In it he argues for a more nuanced and discerning form of communication through conversation—an art form that he showcases in his latest book, How to Read a Novelist. In more than fifty interviews and author profiles of literary titans such as Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, and Doris Lessing, Freeman's conversations and observations uncover these authors' obsessions, quirks, and nuances of character as if they're characters themselves. According to Freeman, a novelist requires observational distance, something to be considered in light of the subject of his first book: "it's the miraculous distance that I think makes the writers who they are." (Anne)
The Karl Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen: Karl Kraus, as immortalized in Walter Benjamin's essay of the same name, was an incendiary aphorist and, in his one-man journal Die Fackel (The Torch), a critic who rivaled Nietzche for implacability. His influence on the culture of pre- and interwar Austria and Germany can't be overstated; writers from Broch to Canetti are in his debt. Yet aphorisms are notoriously hard to translate, and to date, no really good volume of Kraus has been available to lay readers in English. Jonathan Franzen's decision to attempt one is as likely to provoke grousing as most everything he does, but I, for one, salute his berserk industry. (Garth)
The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron: Ephron died a year ago and this fall Random House is bringing out a wide-ranging collection of her writing edited by Robert Gottlieb. The screenplay to When Harry Met Sally will be in there, as will her famous piece on being flat-chested, blog posts on politics and dying, and the screenplay to her last work, Lucky Guy. (Kevin)
The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble: Drabble's eighteenth novel—her first since 2006—is set in 1960s London. It centers on Jessica, an anthropology student who, after becoming pregnant during an affair with a married professor, is forced to raise a daughter alone, her own life's trajectory fracturing as a result. "One thing I have never been very good at is creating 'good' mothers," Drabble said in a 1978 The Paris Review interview. "I'd written books and books before someone pointed out that I was perpetually producing these 'bad' mothers." The "prismatic" novel is told from the perspectives of "the mothers who surround Jess," examining "unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood." (Elizabeth)
Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal: Lore Segal is a treasure-house of wit and a power-house of style. Lucinella, reissued as part of Melville House's Art of the Novella Series, was one of the best books I read in 2009. Now Melville House returns to the well for her first novel since the Pulitzer finalist Shakespeare's Kitchen. The plot involves a suspicious surge in the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease among patients (characters from previous Segal novels among them) at a Manhattan emergency room in the period after September 11. Even the catalog copy brims with insight: "terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria masks deeper fears about mortality." You're welcome, America. (Garth)
The Night Guest by Fiona MacFarlane: Penguin Australia is calling Macfarlane "a new voice" and "a writer who comes to us fully formed." It's true that The Night Guest, which will be published in October, is Macfarlane's debut novel; but she's been publishing stories for some time now, and here you can read a Q&A about her story "Art Appreciation," published in The New Yorker this past May. The Night Guest centers around the mysterious arrival of Frida at the isolated beach house of Ruth, a widow, but "soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn't be." (Sonya)
Every Short Story: 1951-2012 by Alasdair Gray: Exactly what it says on the tin: the comprehensive volume (nearly 1,000 pages!) offers up more than half a century of the Scottish fantasist's short fiction, including sixteen stories published here for the first time. Known for his dark humor and wild imagination, the stories span the broad range of his fascinating career. Whimsical drawings are interspersed throughout, the stories as much visual works as literary ones. "Illustration and typography play a major part in his work," says The Guardian. "He doesn't just write books, he creates them." It's probably worth noting, too, that The Guardian has also described Gray as a "a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters." (Elizabeth)
Personae by Sergio de la Pava: In the wake of A Naked Singularity's success, the University of Chicago Press is likewise reissuing de la Pava's self-published second novel, Personae. In most ways, it's as different from its predecessor as grits from greens—a Cloud Atlas-y series of nested genre pieces covering the whodunit, the interior monologue, and the theater of the absurd. But fans of the earlier book will recognize de la Pava's fearlessness and wild ambition, along with the ventriloquistic range that made the Jalen Kingg letters so moving. An excerpt is available at The Quarterly Conversation. (Garth)
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson: Winterson's new novella, published to critical acclaim in the UK last year, takes on the trial of the Lancashire Witches in 1612, when a group of destitute outcasts, mostly women, were put on trial for witchcraft. "What is clear amid the poverty and brutality here," the critic Arifa Akbar wrote in The Independent, "is that other-worldy evil is far outweighed by the harm that human beings inflict." (Emily)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton: The author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Rehearsal returns with a literary mystery set in 19th century New Zealand. When Walter Moody arrives on the coast of New Zealand, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields, he stumbles upon a gathering of men who have met in secret to discuss a number of apparently coincidental recent events: on the day when a prostitute was arrested, a rich man disappeared, a down-on-his-luck alcoholic died, and a ship's captain canceled all of his appointments and fled. The prostitute is connected to all three men, and Moody finds himself drawn into their interlinked lives and fates. (Emily)
A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor: When Flannery O'Connor was in her early 20s and a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she kept a journal which focused on her relationship with her faith. Recently discovered, this journal should be a fascinating prospect for anyone with an interest in O'Connor's writing, inseparable as it is from her Catholic belief in sin and redemption. It dates from 1946-47, around the time she was writing the stories that would converge into her debut novel Wise Blood. It looks to have been an exercise in bringing herself closer to her God through the act of writing: "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always fugitive. This way I have it every instant." (Mark)
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone: Steven Brookman is a brilliant professor at an elite college in New England. Maud Stack is his promising and alluring young student. You know where this is going. Unfortunately, however, Professor Brookman is a married man, and Maud Stack's passions are "not easily contained or curtailed." In this tale of infidelity and its affects on human relationships—as well as on the institutions in which they reside—Robert Stone makes clear that almost nothing is black and white, and that when it comes to "the allure of youth" and "the promise of absolution," all roads may lead to madness. (Nick)
A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks: Russell Banks—the author of The Sweet Hereafter and The Darling (among many others) and an acknowledged master chronicler of the tragedies of American life—will publish his first collection of short stories in fifteen years. The book is composed of twelve stories, six of which appear for the first time. The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist's last novel, Lost Memory of Skin, documented the straitened lives of a group of sex offenders living under a Florida causeway. (Lydia)
Report from the Interior by Paul Auster: Last year Auster released Winter Journal, a personal history of the author's own body. This fall he will publish a companion piece of sorts that depicts the world as he saw it as a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s. (Kevin)
The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg: Laura van den Berg brings her mystical touch to her second collection of short stories, following her highly praised first collection, What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us, which was shortlisted for The Frank O'Connor International Award. From a writer who professes to "freaking love coming up with zany plots," The Isle of Youth delivers with stories of magicians, private detectives, and identity-trading twins. (Hannah)
Hild by Nicola Griffith: Nicola Griffith, British novelist and former poster child for the woes of American immigration policy (in 1998, The Wall Street Journal called her "a lesbian science-fiction writer," like it's a bad thing). Her newest novel Hild takes place in seventh-century Britain in the Synod of Whitby, where the people were deciding what kind of Christians to be. The name "Hild" refers to the person we now know as St. Hilda, who presided over the conference during which the Synod debated the relative merits of Celtic and Roman Christianity. In an interview with her editor, Griffith reported that the source material on St. Hilda is basically limited to five pages in the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, so she was compelled to do a ferocious amount of research to recreate the world and customs, if not the life, of this early English figure. (Lydia)
Collected Stories by Stefan Zweig: Pushkin Press anointed 2013 as "The Year of Stefan Zweig," in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the famed Austrian author's death by a wartime suicide pact. Zweig's fictions are oft fueled by seduction, desire, and affairs of the heart, mettle which helped make him an author of international renown during his tumultuous lifetime. Pushkin is singlehandedly attempting to reinvigorate Zweig's reputation by issuing a series of rereleases and a handful of new translations of his works. An ideal introduction for the unacquainted comes in the form of Zweig's Collected Stories, featuring twenty-three stories translated by Anthea Bell. (Anne)
Beyond:
Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow: Speaking of eminences grises… From The March to Homer & Langley to that cover version of Hawthorne's "Wakefield" that ran in The New Yorker a few years back, Doctorow just keeps swinging. The product description on Amazon is sketchy, but the talk of a main character "speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor [about] the circumstances that have led him to commit a mysterious act" sound downright Beckett-y, while the title makes me secretly hope Doctorow's returning to science fiction (after suppressing his previous effort, Big as Life). (Garth)
A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald: W.G. Sebald's collection of six essays was originally published in German in 1998, three years before his untimely death. The collection is an homage to six writers and artists ("colleagues," he calls them, and "Alemmanic"), all of whom meant something to Sebald: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and Jan Peter Tripp. Already out in the United Kingdom, the essays are apparently solidly in the Sebald tradition—which, as I understand it, defies attribution of stolid nouns like "criticism," "fiction," or "biography," rejoicing instead in the patterns and echoes of what one critic called "half-reality." (Lydia)
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball: Chronically saddled with the designation of "experimental author," Jesse Ball has written three novels, including The Way Through Doors, a book of poems and flash fiction, and a co-written prose poem, each work demonstrating a gift for quiet, powerful prose and a loose relationship with realism. His first hardcover release, Silence Once Begun, tells the story of a man who confesses to a string of crimes in writing, then never speaks during his arrest or interrogation, and the journalist who becomes obsessed with his case. (Janet)
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee: Best known for his haunting stories of Korean history and American immigrant life, Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee tries his hand at speculative fiction, setting his new novel in a dystopian future in which America is in steep decline and urban neighborhoods have been turned into walled labor colonies that provide fresh produce and fish for the surrounding villages where the elite live. In the novel, Fan, a woman laborer, sets out in search of a vanished lover and finds herself crossing the lawless Open Counties, where the government exerts little control and crime is rampant. (Michael)
Perfect by Rachel Joyce: Rachel Joyce's first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was a national bestseller and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her highly anticipated second novel has two narratives, one about two boys in the early 1970s and their obsession with the two seconds added to clock time to balance with the movement of the earth, and one about a present-day man who is debilitated by his obsessive-compulsive routines. Blogger Kate Neilan loved it, saying, "Rachel Joyce should be praised from the rooftops for Perfect; there's not a thing I'd change about it."
Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus: "With Ben Marcus, as with Beckett, such disruptions are signs of literature itself being stretched and tensed, pressed to express the process of a writer testing his limits," says David Winters in his Millions review of Marcus's recent novel The Flame Alphabet. Marcus has long been a champion of experimental writing and innovative uses of language, as demonstrated by the stories he selected for the unmatched Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His forthcoming Leaving the Sea is the first collection of Marcus's short stories. Expect nothing except more boundary pushing and an exquisite sense of the unexpected. (Anne)
Inherent Vice's Star-Studded Cast
Paul Thomas Anderson's movie adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice is going to have one heck of a star-studded cast. Among the names attached to the production thus far are Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short and Sean Penn. The film is tentatively scheduled for a 2014 release. (Bonus: Take a sneak peek at Pynchon's forthcoming novel, Bleeding Edge.)
New Thomas Pynchon Teaser
Hot off the press: the first page of Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel Bleeding Edge, which is due to hit shelves on September 17.


The idea that you need to eliminate dairy for weight loss is false. This statement has been emphasized recently in the media due to the popularity of certain diets like Paleo and "Whole 30" who claim that dairy is inflammatory, disrupts hormone balance and slows metabolism. These unsubstantiated claims often scare people away from a great source of nutrition that may be just fine for them to consume. In the past, the dairy industry touted that consumption of milk could actually promote weight loss. It is no wonder people are confused by all the mixed messages surrounding dairy intake! As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Dairy is not a miracle food that allows the weight to just shed off nor is it the enemy for weight loss. The truth is that unless you are lactose intolerant or have a dairy allergy or sensitivity there is no reason why it can't be part of your daily balanced diet.
There are many benefits to dairy that you could be missing by eliminating it from your diet entirely. To start, dairy is a great source of protein, vitamins and minerals. For example, one cup of skim milk contains 8g of protein, 299mg calcium and only 83 calories while a 6g container of cottage cheese provides 20g of protein, 154mg of calcium and 146 calories. Similarly a 6oz container of plain nonfat greek yogurt has 18g of protein, 201mg calcium and 100 calories per serving. The combination of protein and carbohydrate in milk makes it an excellent post workout recovery meal. Additionally, dairy products like yogurt and kefir provide the body with necessary probiotics helping to stimulate healthy digestive function.
Of course we want to watch out for added sugars and saturated fat when choosing dairy products. When consuming dairy, be wary of yogurts that have added sugar. It is best to get plain yogurt and add your own fruits, nuts and/or granola for flavor. Also, be aware of the fat content of the dairy you are choosing and the portion sizes. It is okay to consume some cheese that contains a higher fat content such as 1%, 2% or full fat, but just be sure to limit the portion size to about 1 ounce daily, to keep calories in check. Additionally, it will be important to balance out the amount of saturated fat throughout your day. For example, if you choose to consume whole milk in your morning coffee and cereal or some cheese in your midday sandwich, you might choose a leaner cut of meat for lunch and dinner like chicken breast or turkey. The key is to create balance through moderation and choose the lower fat options as much as possible.
If weight loss is your goal, remember that dairy can be an important nutritional component providing an excellent source of protein, vitamins, minerals and probiotics. Unless you are having difficulty digesting dairy or have an allergy towards it, there is no reason to be afraid that it will hinder your weight loss efforts!
Copyright 2011 Compass Nutrition LLC. All Rights Reserved.


AIMO Mount Replacement Pod Cartridge comes with 1.8ml capacity and utilizes ceramic coil to give you most pure rich taste. Side filling design is easy to operate. It features magnet connection design, simple and convenient to insert. 1pc in a pack.
AIMO Lough Replacement Pod Cartridge features 1.0ml capcaity. It adopts 1.2ohm ceramic coil to deliver purer taste and keep stable heat conduction. Easy to refill, no leakage. 1pc in a pack.


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Q: How do I fill a rectangle on canvas with a hatchbrush pattern? I am new to C# and want to fill a rectangle with a brick pattern. How do I do this? Here is what I have done but can't get it to work since I am missing something. I have researched this without success. Here is my simple code:
Rectangle aRect = new Rectangle();
HatchBrush brush = new HatchBrush(HatchStyle.DiagonalBrick,System.Drawing.Color.Black);
aRect.Fill = brush;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange