Lit List: Monday August 8, 2016

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James Brown in Wax ( Source: Berto Garcia via Wikimedia Commons)

James Brown in Wax ( Source: Berto Garcia via Wikimedia Commons)

Good evening literary fans. Here's what we read today that you should too.

  • Finally, a New Harry Potter Story Worth Reading: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lives up to the magic of the original series. (The New Yorker)
  • Mahasweta Devi, 1926-2016: Remembering the iconic Bengali writer who chronicled Maoist insurgencies and skewered caste oppression and gender inequality. (The Paris Review)
  • Mulberry Films Buys the Rights to Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue: A film adaptation is in the works for the Orwellian novel set in a fictionalized authoritarian Egypt. (Arab Lit)
  • The Dive: A child growing up between Peru and Japan learns to dive for pearls.  (Asymptote)
  • 16 Deeply Haunting Photos That Capture Tijuana’s AIDS Epidemic: Tomorrow Is A Long Time is a new book documenting the struggle of people living with AIDS in the Mexican border city. (Buzzfeed Books)
  • Seeing Myself in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You: Ng's novel explores American identity through the story of an Asian family in the 1970s. (Bookriot)
  • Michael Ian Black Reviews 2 Books About the Male Physique: On masculinity, fragility, and physical fitness. (The New York Times)
  • Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump: The most accurate analog to the GOP nominee might be the cruel and vacuous protagonist of The Man Without Qualities. (LARB)
  • Southern Golems: The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Jewish community of New Orleans. (Hazlitt)
  • The Genius of James Brown: The master showman and musician was an eccentric public figure whose private self remains tricky to pin down. (NYRB)