Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism
literary critic on the 12 writers
upon whom he believes the
American canon is built: Walt
Whitman, Herman Melville,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily
Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark
Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace
Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William
Faulkner, and Hart Crane.
RIVERHEAD
Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New
York, and London by Mohsin Hamid
(Feb. 24, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-
59463-365-2) collects previously published essays from the novelist (How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) that counterpoise
the personal and the political with the same
passion and imagination for which Hamid’s
fiction is known.
SANTA FE WRITER’S PROJECT
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My Chinese-America by Allen Gee
(Apr. 1, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-
939650-30-6). Eloquent essays about
Asian-American life make up a collection
that looks at modern America’s insensitivi-ties, stereotypes, and expectations. Gee
examines topics ranging from Jeremy Lin
and immigration to profiling and Asian
silences, in the process casting light
on underexplored corners of American
culture.
SEMIOTEXT(E)
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I’m Very into You: Correspondence,
1995–1996, edited by Matias Viegener
(Mar. 13, paper, $13.95, ISBN 978-1-
58435-164-1). After Kathy Acker met
McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in
1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week exchange of
emails. This collection of their correspondence shimmers with insight, gossip, sex,
and cultural commentary.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
B & Me: A True Story of Literary
Arousal by J.C. Hallman (Mar. 10, hard-
cover, $26, ISBN 978-1-
4516-8200-7). In this funny,
frisky book, Hallman (The
Devil Is a Gentleman) tells his
story of discovering and
reading Nicholson Baker’s
work, in a tip of the hat to
Baker’s own classic U and I,
about John Updike.
The Millionaire and the
Bard: Henry Folger’s
Obsessive Hunt for Shake-
speare’s First Folio by
Andrea Mays (May 12, hardcover, $27,
ISBN 978-1-4391-1823-8). The most valuable book in the world is the First Folio,
which saved William Shakespeare and half
his plays from oblivion. Mays tells the amazing story of this work and the American
Gilded Age industrialist who collected it.
UNIV. OF PITTSBURGH
The State of the Art: A Chronicle of
American Poetry, 1988–2014 by David
Lehman (Mar. 31, hardcover, $24.95,
ISBN 978-0-8229-4439-3) collects all 29
forewords Lehman has written for the
acclaimed Best American Poetry annual since
the series started in 1988, conveying a
sense of American poetry over the past
quarter century.
UNIV. OF TEXAS
It Starts with Trouble: William
Goyen and the Life of Writing by Clark
Davis (May 15, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-
0-292-76730-0). Celebrating a “writer’s
writer” whose friends and rivals included
Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender,
and Truman Capote, this biography offers
the first complete account of novelist
Goyen’s life and writings, which included
The House of Breath and Arcadio.
UPNE/FOREEDGE
Why I Don’t Write Children’s Literature by Gary Soto (Mar. 3, paper, $14.95,
ISBN 978-1-61168-711-8). A poet and
former children’s author returns with
another essay collection (after A Summer
Life) filled with robust, confessional, and
quirkily observational prose, here to consider time and aging.
VIKING
There Is Simply Too Much to Think
About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul
Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor (Mar.
31, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-670-
01669-3). 2015 marks the centennial of
Saul Bellow’s birth, 10th anniversary of his
death, and publication of Zachary Leader’s
much anticipated biography (published by
Knopf, May). This collection, which
includes criticism, interviews, and
speeches, presents lesser-known aspects of
the revered writer.
VINTAGE
How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I’ve
Learned from Reading Too Much by
Samantha Ellis (Feb. 3, paper, $14.95,
ISBN 978-1-101-87209-3). Playwright
Ellis takes a funny, touching look back at
the literary ladies—the characters and the
writers—she loved in childhood. From the
Little Mermaid, through the March sisters,
to Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her
heroines stack up today.
YALE UNIV.
Curiosity by Alberto Manguel (Mar. 17,
hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-18478-
5). Manguel ( The Dictionary of Imaginary
Places) provides an eclectic history of
human curiosity, a rich feast of ideas, and
a memoir of a reading life. Manguel dedicates each chapter to writers who sparked
his imagination, such as Thomas Aquinas,
Dante, Lewis Carroll, and Rachel Carson.
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–
1931, edited by John Haffenden (Feb. 28,
hardcover, $85, ISBN 978-0-300-21179-
5). The fifth volume of Eliot’s collected
letters finds the poet at a crossroads, having
recently dedicated himself to AngloCatholicism and dealing with the continuing deterioration of his marriage to Vivien
Eliot.
Those Who Write for Immortality:
Romantic Reputations and the Dream
of Lasting Fame by H.J. Jackson (Mar. 31,
hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-300-17479-
3). Jackson (Marginalia) launches a provocative inquiry into lasting literary fame,
the gifted writers who have achieved it, and
the gifted writers who have not.
