Interviewed by
Gregory McNamee
on
January 24, 2017
Courtesy Laura Rose
Time is fleeting. Time flies. There’s never enough of it. With apologies to Irma Thomas, the greatest interpreter of the song “Time Is On My Side,” it’s really not.
We modern humans are bound to clocks, to having to be particular places at particular moments, to occupying certain points of the space-time continuum at, well, certain points. But thus has it ever been—for, writes New Yorker staffer Alan Burdick in his new book Why Time Flies, we humans of ...
Interviewed by
Gregory McNamee
on
January 19, 2017
In the winter of 1941, nine members of an Inuit community in a remote corner of the Hudson Bay died at the hands of three neighbors, one of whom proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ returning at the end of days. The victims were presumed to be safe harbors for the devil, and one of the killers, a teenage girl, complained that her hands were frozen “from killing Satan” out on the snow.
It is a story that still resounds ...
By
Eric Liebetrau
on
January 19, 2017
While I’ve always been a devoted novel and short story reader, as the nonfiction editor at Kirkus, I don’t have time to read as much fiction as I would like, and even less in the thriller/mystery/crime genre. This January, though, two acclaimed thriller writers will publish on my side of the aisle.
On Jan. 3, Douglas Preston, known for his Wyman Ford series and his collaborations with Lincoln Child, published The Lost City of the Monkey God, a ...
Interviewed by
Clayton Moore
on
January 17, 2017
Courtesy Valerie Sadoun
Getting the attention of investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein (The JFK Assassination Diary, 2013, etc.) is no small feat. Having profiled everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA chief James Jesus Angleton, Epstein has had a front row seat to the spy game for more than 40 years. So in May, 2013, when NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed mass surveillance programs from a hotel room in Hong Kong before fleeing to Moscow, Epstein took a gamble. A year later he ...
Interviewed by
Alex Layman
on
January 16, 2017
Courtesy Alamy
The first line of Nicotine—Gregor Hens’ meditative exploration on his life as a cigarette smoker—is a stark admission. Over 20 years, Hens proclaims that he smoked more than 100,000 cigarettes. “I’ve even enjoyed a few of them,” he writes. Startling as that number may be, Hens realized upon further thinking that the number in the book is actually a little shy of the truth. “If I calculate roughly how much I really smoked it’s more like half ...
Interviewed by
Megan Labrise
on
January 13, 2017
Courtesy Isan Brant
Writing about the simple life proved anything but for immersive journalist Mark Sundeen.
His original manuscript—an unadorned account of three couples who, in varying ways, have opted out of everyday American consumerism—was accepted and revised when he withdrew it from publisher Riverhead Books.
“I had a close friend read it, call me, and say, I stopped reading at page 175 because I couldn’t figure out why you’d written this book,” says Sundeen, author of The Unsettlers: In Search of ...
By
Eric Liebetrau
on
January 12, 2017
As we finally say good riddance to 2016, let’s start the new year with some positive reading about one of the most transformative figures in the history of American book publishing: Barney Rosset (1922-2012).
Years in the making, the Grove Press publisher’s posthumous memoir, Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, published on Jan. 10. Thanks in part to the efforts of OR Books founder John Oakes, a Grove employee in the 1980s, the book, according to ...
Interviewed by
Alex Layman
on
January 10, 2017
Photo courtesy Shelby Brakken
“I wonder if this book emits its own hiss. What happens when you hold it to your ear?” Joshua Mohr asks in his new memoir, Sirens. “Can you make out my scorched music?”
When reading about a former alcoholic and junkie’s blackouts, cocaine binges, and repeated self-destruction, there’s a comfort to perceived distance. It’s easier to read this story believing addiction is bound to the page and the author’s past, that this follows a formula—the addict was bad ...