What we'll be listening to, watching, and reading to sate our pop culture needs.
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This weekend’s agenda includes Kelly Link’s weird fictional worlds and Diana Krall’s melancholy covers. And, oh yeah, zombies.
You guys have watched the first two minutes of Sunday’s midseason Walking Dead premiere, right? Talk about SAD: There’s sobbing, a haunting scripture reading, and (spoiler alert!) Beth’s burial. There’s also a new plan, and we will be glued to the TV on Sunday to watch our favorite zombie escapers put it into action.
The worlds Kelly Link creates in her short stories are weird, wonderful, and more than a little bit haunting (in some cases, literally). With Get In Trouble she spins dark fairy tales in which normal-seeming worlds turn out to be anything but.
Diana Krall pushes her sultry voice to new heights (or should we say lows?) on her new album Wallflower. This collection of covers—with tracks from Bob Dylan, the Carpenters, the Eagles, and Elton John—gets Krall’s gorgeous melancholic treatment, and with it a new identity of beautiful desperation.
LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s eagerly awaited debut novel, Jam on the Vine, follows Ivoe Williams, the daughter of emancipated slaves, from the Jim Crow South to Kansas City where she starts a newspaper with her lover, Ona. She takes on some of the darkest parts of America’s all-too-recent past with this riveting story of race, sexism, and the queer community of the early 20th century.