Five new books out this week, and links to related content you won’t find anywhere else.
Prose master Joy Williams has a new collection of microfictions called Ninety-Nine Stories of God. Read her short story “The Visiting Privilege,” as it first appeared in Conjunctions.
This week New Directions Press releases a reprinting of Moise and the World of Reason, a novel about New York City’s West Village in the 70s. Its author, Tennessee Williams, was best known for his award-winning earlier plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “The Glass Menagerie.” But, as critics have noted, it’s hard to keep writing when everyone assumes your best work is behind you.
On the nonfiction front, Kate Summerscale‘s new book sounds like a scorcher: Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer recreates the story of 13-year-old Robert Coombes, who, in the summer of 1895, killed his mother and was sentenced to the infamous lunatic asylum Broadmoor. A senior social worker at Broadmoor has studied the relationships of its long-term patients with their families.
Delia Ephron has written novel about unraveling marriages called Siracusa. Ephron also co-wrote, with her sister Nora, the film You’ve Got Mail; here is a critical response to that film and its unexpected echoes in the business world.
And finally, disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer is back with A Book About Love. A New York Times review referred to the book as being like “an advice column by way of JSTOR.” Obviously we enjoyed this. Therefore, we’d like to introduce our actual advice column: Dear JSTOR.
