At Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Robert Greene II recommends a handful of books coming out this spring and summer, including Irvin J. Hunt’s Dreaming the Present, Marcy J. Dinus’s The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”, and Jeremy Schipper’s Denmark Vesey’s Bible.
Deadline reports that Andy Serkis will direct Nick Hornby’s film adaptation of Elizabeth McCracken’s 1996 novel The Giant’s House.
For the New Republic, Osita Nwanevu writes about how films about the political system and D.C. politics—like Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972) and Mick Nichols’s Primary Colors (1998)—may have affected how viewers see politics. “Our obsession with political hacks has encouraged the public to think about politics on the hacks’ terms,” Nwanevu writes. “Entirely too much time we might otherwise spend debating policies and values has been given over to trading superstitions about ‘electability’ and ‘momentum.’”
The Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl, which started on April 23, will culminate tomorrow with a celebration of Independent Bookstore Day at the Center For Fiction. Also on Saturday, in Manhattan, McNally Jackson Books will host a literary trivia night for teams to compete against the store’s booksellers.
On May 18, Triple Canopy will host Richard Beck, Ari M. Brostoff, and Sean McCann to give talks on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s political thriller novels, coauthored with Bill Patterson and Louise Penny, respectively. Each speaker will evaluate one novel (The President Is Missing, The President’s Daughter, or State of Terror) and attempt to answer: “How does the form of the thriller work to augment the Clintons’ agendas, and vice versa? How has the story of America changed in the past thirty years, in each Clinton’s telling? What might Louise Penny’s foreign policy resemble? And what are James Patterson’s presidential chances?” The event is free to attend in person and will be livestreamed at 6:30pm Eastern time.