Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow is out today (Kakutani sez, “remarkably tedious” but The Guardian adds, “Amis might draw comfort from the long and distinguished list of Kakutani’s literary victims.”) Also out, Sebastian Junger’s War, the result of time spent embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan.
Tuesday New Release Day
Good Ol’ Fashioned Library Feud
Due to some outcry, Robert Darnton comes to the defense of the New York Public Library’s proposed expansion and revamping.
“Then suddenly, a bicycle”
“Since I often biked to my therapist’s, he took note of my helmet and asked how my new exercise regimen was going. It’s going great! I said. I love it! I wish I’d known earlier that I ought to bike. Now I hated going underground. It was like the death instinct to go underground, into the subway. I never realized I hated it so utterly until I didn’t have to do it anymore.” On riding a bike in New York.
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On Rejection
A few weeks back, Indiana Review editor Joe Hiland shared his list of stories he most often rejects. Now, Michael Mlekoday, the publication’s poetry editor, does likewise with his list of “Five Marks of Oft-Rejected Poems.” Meanwhile, Missouri Review editor Michael Nye has some qualms about this type of post.
“Silent” Reading
When you read silently, are you really reading silently? Or, as some researchers hypothesized in a recent study, are you “making ‘sound’ in your head?”
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Thoughts on a Prodigy
“The American poem was not in a grave at that time; not by any measure. There was achievement, experiment, excitement. But there was also confinement. It could be felt in the air, in an ethos of conditional acceptance. A young woman poet was not yet a familiar sight. When Auden remarked about [Adrienne] Rich’s poems, after choosing her as a Yale Younger Poet, that they were ‘neatly and modestly dressed,’ it sounded more like a counsel for the nursery than acclaim for a new writer.” At The New Republic, Eavan Boland reflects on the legacy of the poet, whose posthumous collection, Later Poems, came out last week.
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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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Computer of Horrors
If you’re on the East Coast and still have power, don’t let Sandy ruin your Halloween – feast your eyes on these vintage horror paperback covers, instead. Stay safe!