Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama’s first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days.
The Latest in Obama Lit
Anxiety of Influence
“Cursed Child … is an act of overreach that feels mandated not by [J.K.] Rowling’s desire to fill out details but by an entertainment industry intent on reviving and rebooting anything that’s ever made money.” Sophie Gilbert reviews Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for The Atlantic.
Packing (Books) for Mars
What do you do when you’re trapped in a Mars-bound space capsule for five hundred and twenty days? Well, if you’re like Italian/Colombian space engineer Diego Urbina, you read twenty seven books, including those by Gabriel García Márquez.
Sun Ra’s True Birthday
Seth Colter Walls shares some Sun Ra tracks while commenting on the conclusion of his Arkestra’s tour in Lincoln Center. As always, any piece about the musician is enriched with a reading of Jake Adam York’s poem, “At Sun Ra’s Grave.”
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The Forgotten Forty
In a sea of Best Book lists, LitHub spoke to 40 booksellers about the most overlooked titles of 2017. On the list? Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which was featured in Emily St. John Mandel‘s Year in Reading.
More on Rizzoli’s
Rizzoli’s is closing, but if the owners have their way, there’ll be a Rizzoli’s II opening its doors in the near future. In the meantime, you can read this Times piece about the bookstore, which puts its closing into context.
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