If you’re going to be at AWP, check out the Flatmancrooked and Mud Luscious Press “Author vs. Puppet” reading (and, yes, puppet show). I’ll be reading/puppeteering, as will novella writers Emma Straub and Alyssa Knickerbocker, among others. The fun starts at the Flatmancrooked booth on Friday at 4 pm!
AWP Madness
This Is Just to Say [VARIABLE VARIABLE]
I’ve noted before how William Carlos Williams’s famous poem, “This Is Just to Say,” has become an internet meme, but I haven’t noted the ongoing and delightfully random “Just to Say” Twitter bot. And also, I haven’t before linked to Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s riff on Williams’s rhythms.
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A Frank Poet
“Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. / Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.” Last week, Ocean Vuong published his newest collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. This week, it seems to be all anyone can talk about (because it’s fantastic). Here’s a piece from The New Yorker on Vuong and his designs for the English language.
DFW Interview from Russia
The NYRB blog unearths a 2006 interview with David Foster Wallace by a Russian journalist. “I will probably at some point finish a novel. Whether it will be good enough to publish, I don’t know.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Burton; Smith; Vreeland; Pitre; Earley; Dennis
New this week: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton; The Story of Land and Sea by Katy Simpson Smith; Lisette’s List by Susan Vreeland; Fives and Twenty Fives by Michael Pitre; Mr. Tall by Tony Earley; and Love, of a Kind by Felix Dennis. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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“Tea without milk is so uncivilized.”
British Flight Lieutenant Alex Cassie, memorably portrayed by Donald Pleasence in one of my all-time favorite films, The Great Escape, passed away last week at the age of 95.
Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
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