In a real nail-biter, the winner of this year’s Tournament of Books is…
The Rooster Bequeathed
The Belletristic Branch
At the Poetry Foundation’s website, a list of twelve poets that captivated American presidents.
Silly Prizes
In a piece with which our own Mark O'Connell probably agrees, Tim Parks explains the Nobel Prize for Literature's inherent silliness.
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JJS on Seidel
"Seidel scared himself with poetry, and us too. How had he done it?" John Jeremiah Sullivan presented the Hadada Award to Frederick Seidel at The Paris Review's Spring Revel last month. You can read the full text of his speech and three of Seidel's poems. This seems to be a much better week for Sullivan because he also just won the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his essay “I Placed a Jar in Tennessee.”
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Who Can You Trust Anymore?
A Russian publisher has stooped to a new low: it added “fake quotes from fake newspapers on the cover of a … novel released this summer.” That’s not all, either. Apparently the publishers are trying to bill the book as a “Swedish” crime novel even though it was actually written by a Russian under a pseudonym.
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Tin Man
Sergeant Ed Drew's tintypes of the war in Afghanistan are the first tintypes made in a combat zone since The Civil War. Drew made them for his son. "I wanted him to know his father in the event that I was killed in action and it became less important that my work was done in tintype than that I could show the humanity of war in the eyes of airmen I fly combat missions with," he said.
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Love and Death in Miami
The Takeaway hosted two ambitious author panels at last month’s Miami Book Fair International. The first panel covered “love,” and featured Millions contributor Christopher Beha alongside Jami Attenberg and three others. The second panel focused on “death,” and it featured writers and literary figures as well as Benjamin Busch, an Iraq War veteran.
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