This NY Times article on libraries surprised me with a revelation about the smallest, saddest library in human history: the children’s library at Auschwitz, consisting of eight books that the girls hid every night so the guards wouldn’t confiscate them. But it goes on to talk about the role of libraries, and how it’s shifted away from […]
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has had high odds for the last few years among pundits to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. This year he’s currently given 7/1 odds, just behind Haruki Murakami. Although we don’t have any official confirmation that the Nobel prize committee has been entertaining the notion of giving him the most coveted […]
It’s a sad day for the world of poetry. James Tate, a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, died today. RIP. He was 71. His poems have been described as “tragic, comic, absurdist, nihilistic, hopeful, haunting, lonely, and surreal.” (The Poetry Foundation). His death will leave his many readers in mourning. He is […]
Benjamin Percy on writing in Poets & Writers: “Consider this. Picasso trained in realism before he shattered our way of seeing. Patricia Smith can rock a sonnet or villanelle as well as experiment with free verse. Can you say the same? Can you write something that is scene-driven and as tightly fitted as a Lego […]
French artist Stephane Heuet has visualized a book long thought to be beyond visualization. Over fifteen years he offered six installments of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” in French, and now this graphic novel has been collected and will be released in English. Faithful Proustians will surely make an uproar about how much has been lost, […]
I love this right-scrolling video game with punctuation. So reminiscent of the early 90s Nintendo games.
Anne Enright in conversation with Diane Prokop at The Millions: “Well, I wrote out beyond the end of this book, and then I brought it back in again. I wanted the characters to be on the brink of something new, without actually going into that territory. You get out early in your ending. I sometimes […]
If you haven’t yet read J.M. Ledgard’s novel “Submergence,” you should. Ledgard is wonderfully worldly, veering between microscopic jellies of the ocean to intricate knowledge of Somalian culture and the psychology of al-Qaeda jihadists. It’s hard to come up with a comparable author who demonstrates such widespread and intricate knowledge of the world. Although it’s a disservice to […]
The Tournament of Books released its longlist — 62 books (!). They will narrow it down to 16 in January. In case you can’t wait until January, here are the 16 I would love to see compete come March. You can view this either as a prediction or as a recommendation — take your pick. […]
