Southern Comfort
The Muse of Impossibility
“[T]he use of similes and metaphors confesses the defeat of language: we must compare because we cannot say.” -From Alberto Manguel’s stunning essay “The Muse of Impossibility” in The Threepenny Review. (via The Rumpus)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Unferth; Grodstein; Carter; Journey; Brown; Lethem
Out this week: Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth; Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein; Lucky You by Erika Carter; An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey; The River of Kings by Taylor Brown; and More Alive and Less Lonely by Jonathan Lethem. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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A Monument to Suffering and Courage
Everyone is talking about Nobel Prize winning Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Allow Jonathon Sturgeon at Flavorwire to explain why he believes Alexievich’s victory is a step in the right direction for the Prize.
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Stieg Larsson’s High School Fiction
A forthcoming anthology of Swedish crime fiction – fittingly entitled A Darker Shade of Sweden – will contain a piece from a 17-year-old Stieg Larsson, reports Julie Bosman. The book will be published this February.
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The Kite and the String
“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.” The Atlantic has an excellent contribution to the age-old thesis that creativity and madness are inextricably linked–and tied, moreover, to mental illness–based in part on a sample of students at Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Pair with another essay on creativity and the “touch of madness” from our own archives.
If It Is Fine Tomorrow
This list of the ten best weather events in fiction history includes, among other things, the mud in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and the fraught weather forecast from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Let’s talk a little bit more about weather with this review from The Millions.
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Pride, Prejudice, and Neopets
When YA author Jordan Ifueko was 10, she brought her two passions, Neopets and Jane Austen, together in a popular fan-fiction tale, "Pride, Prose, and Princes."
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Welcome to the Party, VQR!
Thanks to Jane Friedman, the Virginia Quarterly Review is really blossoming of late when it comes to social media and increased web presence. Case in point: these once-a-week poem posters on their Facebook page. Extra case in point: the sort-of-not-so-secret Tumblr they’re working on!
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