University Of Chicago Press has come out with a new edition of a somewhat forgotten classic in the campus novel genre. Randall Jarrell was a National Book Award-winning poet who wrote only one novel, Pictures from an Institution, about the fictional Benton College. The Kenyon Review published the opening of the novel in its Winter 1953 issue. It begins: “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.”
A Campus Novel Classic
Poem Piece
"Take your pants off / before you fight." Apparently Yoko Ono's releasing a new book of poetry.
Get Your Tissues
The first trailer for the film adaptation of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief is out. Expect a lot of Oscar nominations and tears.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ford, Theroux, Johnson
This week brings Richard Ford's latest novel, Canada, as well as a new novel from Paul Theroux, The Lower River. And Millions favorite and Pulitzer finalist Train Dreams by Denis Johnson is now out in paperback.
It’s just not the same, is it?
Don’t like the idea of reading e-books to your kids? Turns out you're not alone -- a new study reported in the Christian Science Monitor says (pdf) that seventy percent of parents who own iPads prefer to use print books when reading to their children. If you read these articles, you might have seen this coming.
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Literary One-Hit Wonders
Second Act lists the renowned literary one-hit wonders, including John Kennedy Toole, Sylvia Plath and Ralph Ellison. (via AuthorScoop)
Brief Encounters
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10 Rules for Writers by Janet Fitch
"Write the sentence, not just the story" is the first of ten rules for writers from Janet Fitch.
“Life, friends, is boring”
“These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses.” At The Rumpus, a memory of falling in love with The Dream Songs (which happens to nicely complement a piece we published back in April).
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