Alice Herz-Sommer, a 106-year-old Holocaust survivor and the last living person who knew Franz Kafka personally, reminisces about her friend in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Kafka was a slightly strange man…”
Kafka’s last living friend remembers
Cheryl Strayed Discovers Her Long Lost Sister
NPR caught up with Wild author Cheryl Strayed to talk about a stranger who had a particularly personal connection with the writer’s book. As it turns out, she was Strayed’s half-sister. (Bonus: we interviewed Strayed for our site last year.)
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Depravity’s Rainbow
The #AuthorSexts trending topic had us rolling the other day, and now you can revisit some of the best submissions thanks to Electric Literature.
Victor LaValle’s Exceptional Latest
Year in Reading alum Victor LaValle’s just-released novel The Devil in Silver was shouted out in our first Great 2012 Book Preview, and Nathan Huffstutter says it’s “exceptional.”
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Platform Proliferation
The Atlantic points out another consequence of the digital revolution: books now come in multiple formats at dozens of price points. A symptom of publisher panic? A boon for readers?
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New from Claudia Rankine
Experience Claudia Rankine’s sound and fury in a new poem in The New Yorker. Pair with a piece on why Americans love poetry, but not poetry books.
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Should’ve Known Better
“Grief doesn’t only disturb life; it disturbs the way we talk about life. As myriad aspects of our existence are questioned and reexamined in the wake of a death, so too is our relationship with the language we rely on for our grief’s expression.” This track-by-track take on Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell from The Rumpus is really just a magnificent, emotive piece on elegy.
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