If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the new books and culture website The Nervous Breakdown. They’ve already got a great interview with Millions favorite Dan Chaon, as well as some interesting essays that I’m looking forward to digging into. I also like their “self-interview” series–where writers ask, and answer, their own questions.
The Nervous Breakdown
Dear Reader, You are reading
Gawker’s Adrian Chen has uncovered the man who is ultimately behind @Horse_ebooks. If you’re unfamiliar with the constant stream of found poetry that is @Horse_ebooks, you may want to start with this Splitsider essay, which includes a cameo from John Darnielle.
Riding Trains Across the Heartland
We’re glad to hear that this autobiographical essay from David Biespiel at The Rumpus is only the first in a sequence of autobiographical portraits to be published on Poetry Wire on his upbringing as a poet.
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Burning Libraries
An arsonist broke into the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library, but Robert Long Foreman‘s dismayed for more than that reason.
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Diving Into the Wreck
It’s time for a game of critic versus critic: at the Nation and the Huffington Post, respectively, Ange Mlinko and Carol Muske-Dukes consider and reconsider the poetry of Adrienne Rich.
Lambda Literary Award Names 2019 Finalists
Whittled down from a pool of 1,000 submissions, the finalists for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards—which highlight and celebrate LBGTQ literature—include Akwaeke Emezi, Joseph Cassara, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Patrick Nathan, and Jordy Rosenberg.
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Bernhard and Olive Garden
“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
Flame Throwers
“Try to imagine Hemingway telling Fitzgerald, ‘My tailor flamed me on Amazon because I panned him on Yelp.'” Author D. Foy wrote a negative review of a tailor on Yelp, so the tailor threatened to pan his forthcoming book, Made to Break, on Amazon.
Kofi Awoonor Memorial Reading
Iowa City, which is one of six UNESCO Cities of Literature, will honor renowned Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor with a memorial reading this Monday, October 14. Awoonor was among those killed in the attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The reading, which will be hosted by Awoonor’s nephew, Kwame Dawes, will take place on the University of Iowa campus, but it will also be open to anybody with an internet connection. People are invited to tune in to the event’s streaming webcast, and also to submit questions for Dawes online to the @UIIWP Twitter account by utilizing the #Awoonor hashtag.
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