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Book News: New 'Dragon Tattoo' Novel Coming From New Author

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

  • Stieg Larsson, the author of the bestselling Millennium novels, died almost a decade ago. Now his Swedish publisher has asked another writer to pick up where Larsson left off. Swedish author David Lagercrantz will write a fourth book in the Millennium series, to be published in August 2015. Larsson wrote three books out of a planned 10-book series — The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest — before he died in 2004. Larsson had begun a fourth, but an estate dispute kept it from being published.
  • "The Anarchist Cookbook should go quietly and immediately out of print," William Powell, the book's author, tells NBC. The book, which contains instructions for making weapons and explosives, was apparently read by 18-year-old Karl Pierson before he opened fire at a high school in Colorado last week. Powell has long since renounced the methods endorsed in the book, calling it "a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in." Powell's publisher holds the copyright, and told NBC that he does not intend to let it go out of print.

  • Julie Buntin from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses profiles Lorrie Moore, who is coming out with a new collection of stories in February, for Publisher's Weekly: "Moore sits at the edge of her chair drinking champagne, her answers to questions evasive — a private person's way of getting around the dilemma of being the subject of a magazine profile. ... This dodging is also on display in her stories. Moore's characters are verbal jousters — they banter, they tease, they are as smart and self-deprecating as your cleverest friend."
  • The (extremely) short story writer Lydia Davis celebrates the (also very) short story writer Osama Alomar, who is an exile from Syria: "While some of the tales are explicitly angry or bitter, others are ironically detached, and still others make their point with a piece of sly wit, one of these being The Pride of the Garbage, in which a bag loaded with garbage, in its vainglory, is satisfied only if it is placed on the very top of the heap of bags bound for the dump."

    At McSweeney's, Rebecca Coffey gives her recipe for Nietzsche's Angel Food Cake: "Ecstatically whip, as if possessed by a storm-wind of freedom, 1-1/2 cups of excellent egg whites with 1/4 tsp. salt and 1-1/2 tsp. cream of tartar. Continue until peaks are as if raised to their own heights and given wings in a fine air, a robust air."

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Annalisa Quinn is a contributing writer, reporter, and literary critic for NPR. She created NPR's Book News column and covers literature and culture for NPR.
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