Tonight, at Book Court in Brooklyn, join Laura Kipnis for a launch party for her new book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation.
Jonathan Franzen’s next novel, Purity, will be released in September of next year. Franzen’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, says the book has a fabulist element, a “mythic undertone.” The story follows a young woman in search of her father’s identity, and describes her relationship to a hacker and whistleblower. An authorized biography of Franzen—Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage, by Swarthmore professor Philip Weinstein—arrives next year as well. Anti-Franzen feeling has reached real heights since Freedom: Will it be interesting or merely wearying to watch people go at it?
Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s memoir, Do No Harm, has been shortlisted for the Guardian’s first-book award (10,000 pounds offered to debut works in any genre).” Other shortlisted titles include American journalist Evan Osnos’ s Age of Ambition, Australian novelist Fiona MacFarlane’s The Night Guest, Irish writer Colin Barrett’s collection of short stories, Young Skins, and Chinese writer May-Lan Tan’s collection of short stories,Things to Make and Break.
On Thursday night, a Ditmas Park writers group was literally robbed of their words: An armed thief broke in and stole the members’ three laptops and an iPad.
Pléiade has released a four-volume collection of Marguerite Duras’s complete works to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth. At the Times Literary Supplement, Dan Gun recalls his initial review of Duras’s account of her early life, L’Amant. It was a work told “not as a continuum but as a series of pulsations. . . . Love, in Duras, is never comfortably in the present, but is in anticipation or after-shock—the après-coup.”
Airbnb is starting a print magazine called Pineapple. Eighteen thousand copies will be distributed to eager hosts around the world.