👀 Have You Seen the Trailer for NIGHTBITCH?
Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Working on Her Night Moves
The official trailer for Marielle Heller’s big-screen adaptation of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, starring Amy Adams and Scoot McNairy, has dropped, and boy is it really something. For those unfamiliar, Nightbitch is about a woman who puts her career on hold in order to have a child, and—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—finds out that “motherhood is a bitch.” It’s a familiar setup that takes an original twist when the woman…maybe starts turning into a dog at night? Big swing for a novel, sure, but you can get away with a lot of weird things on the page. On screen, this will either be great or very bad. I’ve been looking forward to seeing how an adaptation would play out, and I’m sorry to say signs point to not great, Bob.
Making Waves?
I’ve seen a lot of creative uses of book-related data in my time, but never quite like this. An Ocean of Books is a “poetic experiment” that maps the world of literature by calculating the distance between authors as expressed by “their complex relationship on the web.” More than 113,000 featured authors each have their own island, on which each of their books (a total of more than 140,000) is a city.
The creators used machine learning to generate the map, which I scoped out with a few of my personal faves, and all I can say is that these folks must live on a very different internet than I do. Colson Whitehead’s closest neighbors are Elizabeth Chadwick, Kresley Cole, and Leigh Bardugo. George Saunders’s island is practically on top of Upton Sinclair’s, and Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) is a stone’s throw away. You can’t read about Toni Morrison without running into references to Faulkner. Is he close by? No, he is not. But Andrea Camilleri (the Inspector Montalbano series), Barbara Erskine, and Sylvia Day (?!) sure are. Not even notorious literary buds J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis could land neighboring islands. A.I. can do a lot of things, but this ain’t one of them.
Not Another Fall Book Preview
How about a moment of enthusiasm? Vulture‘s list of the best new book releases of fall has something for everybody, including the rarest of things: a few titles I haven’t seen on all the other lists. A Pedro Almodóvar short story collection? Sounds weird and fun. A guide to horror movies for people too scared to watch them? Sign me up. An unearthed manuscript by the primary lyricist for The Grateful Dead? Not my jam, but I bet your dad will love it as a holiday gift. What’s atop your fall TBR? Holler back in comments!
Nothing But the Truth
This is probably the last month before the election that I’ll have brain space for nonfiction, so this round-up of 10 new nonfiction reads for September is right up my alley. And for when my brain has melted, there’s a book about soup!
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