Powell’s Books announces their Puddly Awards. Vote for your favorite book of the last decade.
The Puddlies
When Good Things Happen to Bad People
When Good Things Happen to Bad People: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. On one of our favorite industry blogs, The Rejectionist weighs in on one of publishing’s perennial problems: what to do when someone really foul ends up being way more successful than you are.
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Shakespeare Tour
The Folger Shakespeare Library is sending the First Folio around the country to honor the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Decadence and Poetry
“To say that late Victorian poetry is bleak would be akin to remarking that Wilkie Collins had a decent knack for plotting a novel. These poems are freighted with Gothic overtones, and it is not uncommon for some supernatural phenomenon to intrude upon what had started out as a seemingly harmless quatrain. We often encounter Death himself—or the Devil—who is something of a literary celebrity for the decadent poets. But what marks the best of these poems is that the outré is in service to something that we can think of as more desperate, and, wouldn’t you know, human.” Over at The Boston Review, an online-only essay looking at the peculiarities of Victorian decadent poetry.
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Flavorwire on Author Photos
From Flavorwire, another contribution to the burgeoning field of author photo analysis.
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A Chance for Closure
E. V. De Cleyre explores the right moment to end a nonfiction story. She writes that life rarely offers conclusions, and “dealing with actual occurrences often means there is no definitive end, and even if there were (such as a death), there comes the aftermath—the grief, the coping, the rebuilding.” Pair with Sonya Chung’s Millions essay on literary endings.
Texas Book Festival
The Texas Book Festival lineup has been announced. If you’re in Austin this October, stop by the check out Chad Harbach, Erin Morgenstern, Lev Grossman, and Amy Waldman among others.
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