The Picador Book Room

This week’s Friday Reads from the Picador team…

Elianna recommends:

Anna Breslaw’s astute take on female comedians and their conscious (or subconscious) manipulation of their own physicality. Read it on The New Inquiry site.

Darin’s reading Coral Glynn, the newest book by Peter Cameron (author of Picador favorite Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You). Additionally, he’s working on Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White.

In honor of this week’s release of Bring Up the Bodies, Alaina decided to move Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall to the top of her TBR stack.

Gabrielle says:

I just finished reading the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “Means of Communication,” and highly recommend it to anyone interested in print publishing and broadcast media. They have some great historical pieces in there as well as contemporary essays from Nicholson Baker and language columnist Ben Zimmer. I reviewed it on my blog (shameless, I know).

This week I started Store of the Worlds: The Short Stories of Robert Scheckly, a collection of classic science fiction stories with an introduction from Jonathan Lethem.  Fans of the greats – Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Heinlein – will want to check this out. And, speaking of Jonathan Lethem, the Slate Book Review has an amazing essay on autobiographical criticism using Lethem’s book for the 33 1/3 series on the Talking Heads album Fear of Music as a jumping off point. 

Justin’s pick this week is The Train by Georges Simenon.

(Deservedly) Famous for his Inspector Maigret Mysteries, The Train, is one of Simenon’s “roman durs,”a set of novels he himself called “non-commercial” and implied were more rigorous than his mysteries. For more on these novels, Richard Rayner’s recent column in the Los Angeles Review of Books is a good starting place.

Henry is thoroughly enjoying George R.R. Martin’s first Game of Thrones book:

The HBO show did a faithful job of bringing the first book to life, so reading it after viewing it can seem redundant, but I love being in this world and may have to commit to reading the rest of the books.

When she has a moment to escape her submissions pile, Elizabeth is working through A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by the “ingenious” David Foster Wallace.