The Mueller report holds the top 3 slots on the New York Times best-seller list

And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects.

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of May 12, 2019.

• A cautionary tale: An author approached the book review site Sci-Fi & Scary to ask for intel on a forthcoming review of his book, because he has anxiety. The site’s editor kindly gave the author a heads-up that the review was not a straightforward gush, and the author wrote back … quite the screed. My favorite part is when he breaks out his SAT scores to explain why no one could possibly ever give him a negative review:

In an English masters class, I received the only A in a room full of English and liberal arts majors — and I was a chemistry major. Please think about that. One of my compositions during my college years was sent on to the Dean of Liberal Arts for its quality when no other student was accorded such an honor. In taking the required test for university admissions, I scored in the top 1% of the Verbal section of the SAT and, upon graduation with degrees in chemistry, biology, and marketing, began writing complex marketing reports for CEOs of Fortune 500 firms.

• The three different editions of the Mueller report are now Nos. 1, 2, and 3 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. (We explained the difference between the three editions here at Vox.)
• Interview magazine asked a bunch of New York indie booksellers about Sally Rooney fever. (We have it too.) Mostly the booksellers just confirm that Rooney is extremely popular, especially with young white women, but I am sort of awed by the level of shade in this answer from Greenlight Books:

This one woman came in, dressed kind of cool, and she was like, “Okay, my therapist told me I have to read something that makes me look dumb when I pull it out.” Obviously she was high-strung. She said she was having trouble enjoying reading for pleasure outside of intellectual stimulation. She was holding another book that was more literary. And I was just immediately like, “Well, you have to read this. Because the cover will totally make you look stupid.” It’s so cheesy. It’s this yellow cover with these two white women’s faces on it. It just looks so rom-com-y.

• Critics have believed for a long time that Susan Sontag was the uncredited co-author of her ex-husband’s book on Freud. A new biography claims that she actually wrote the whole thing:

It had long been rumoured that Susan Sontag was the true author of her husband’s great book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She married Philip Rieff when she was just 17; in the pictures she looks even younger. And the book is so sophisticated that it hardly seemed possible that she could be the true author. But in the course of my research, I discovered that she had indeed written it, only agreeing to sign it over during an acrimonious divorce, in order to keep her ex-husband from taking her child. “It was a blood sacrifice,” a friend told me.

• At Vice, Phoebe Hurst wonders if the new anti-diet book trend isn’t just the same thing as the old diet book trend:

Sure enough, flick through any of the recently published anti-diet books and you’ll find a narrative depressingly similar to that of a traditional diet book. They speak to the reader as a chronic dieter — female, of course — and depressed with her lack of progress at losing weight. The authors note that they are not doctors, but justify their claims by explaining that they, too, had a troubled relationship with food. (In the introduction to The No Need to Diet Book, Turner writes, “I have done juicing, ‘clean eating,’ Paleo, veganism, vegetarianism and even a brief attempt at raw veganism.”) Finally, the authors introduce the reader to their salvation: a new eating approach that helped them realise that they need never to diet again.

• At Full Stop, Tom LeClair writes in praise of literary bullshitting, a storytelling mode that cares more about voice and humor than “truth or sincerity or politeness”:

The Bullshitter line runs from Melville to Twain to Faulkner to Miller, all heavily influenced by colloquial oral discourse. The line continues with Burroughs and Pynchon and the Gaddis of J R. For contemporary Bullshitters, garrulous orality was a way out of the realism machine and a way to distinguish themselves from the Artistes of rigorous control. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is probably the most extreme example as he throws the voices of the carny barker and drug hustler and 50s hipster within a very loosely organized collection of narratives and monologues. You can hear Burroughs’ hallucinogens and hipsters in many of the numerous digressions in Gravity’s Rainbow, particularly in the last hundred or so pages where Pynchon quotes from Naked Lunch and where, like the rocket, Gravity’s Rainbow appears to lurch out of control. J R is all talk all the time, though actually more fractured dialogue than continual Bullshitting.

• At the Millions, Geoffrey Hilsabeck reads Charlotte’s Web with his daughter:

At the heart of Charlotte’s Web are two subjects about which my four year old is intensely curious: friendship and death. Charlotte (the spider) and Wilbur (the pig) are each other’s first and best friends. They ease each other’s loneliness, on rainy days, especially. They play. Charlotte tells Wilbur stories and sings to him. By writing the words “some pig,” “terrific,” “radiant,” and “humble” in her web, Charlotte saves Wilbur’s life, convincing Homer Zuckerman that Wilbur is extraordinary, a miracle, and so should not be slaughtered for smoked bacon and ham.

• At LitHub, Laura Ingalls Wilder biographer Caroline Fraser considers why there are so few biographies of women:

That may be because the political powerlessness of women over the course of human history cannot be exaggerated, and the ways in which this has been brought home to every individual woman — even those who acquired a temporary, tentative hold on power — have altered all women’s lives, accomplishments, and expression in every field. In over a dozen centuries, for example, England was ruled by eight queens, only two more women than had their heads handed to them, or were burned at the stake, by Henry VIII.

• At the Ringer, Brian Phillips demands respect for George R.R. Martin here in the last days of Game of Thrones:

Martin is not an amateur or a child. He’s one of the best fantasy writers of his generation, and having the work of a great fantasy writer to draw from surprisingly turns out to be a useful asset for a television series in the fantasy genre. Losing that work turns out to be enough of a detriment that not even several extremely expensive computers and the world’s most ruthless commitment to night shoots can be guaranteed to make up for it. I have serious qualms about aspects of A Song of Ice and Fire, particularly the way it uses its naturalistic depiction of power as a cover for eroticizing sexual violence. From a storytelling standpoint, though? The more Game of Thrones was about bringing Martin’s vision to the screen, the better it was — darker, stranger, less compromised, more unsettling, more gripping, easier to care about. The more it became about what I guess we can call Benioff and Weiss’s vision, the worse it got — more arbitrary, more pandering, less able to connect its grand spectacle to anything on a human scale.

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Here’s a rundown of the past week in books at Vox:

• The terrific new novel Women Talking asks what justice looks like in the post-#MeToo age
• How bad prosecutors fuel America’s mass incarceration problem
• Orange World, Karen Russell’s third short story collection, is elegant and eldritch

As always, you can keep up with Vox’s book coverage by visiting vox.com/books. Happy reading!

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