Did you think the title of the most recent book you read could’ve been improved if it had been a bit more straightforward? Then Better Book Titles is for you. Among their more inspired retitlings: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Gay Jewish Magicians Kill Nazis), Blink (Everyone is Racist), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (The First Book I’ve Read in Six Years).
Better Book Titles
Writing About Suicide
Recommended reading: Philip Connors, whose memoir All the Wrong Places was included in our 2015 Book Preview, writes for the New Yorker about his brother's death and the problems with "cathartic" writing.
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Inaugural National Student Poets Named
Congratulations to the five young writers named to the inaugural class of the National Student Poets Program. Louisa Banchoff (17), Miles Hewitt (17), Claire Lee (16), Natalie Richardson (17) and Lylia Younes (17) were appointed by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and they will serve as “literary ambassadors” for the next year.
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.
Lights of Lit
Infographic of the Week: Check out these memorable lights in literature from Solar Centre to brighten your day.
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Remembering Sue Grafton
Crime novelist Sue Grafton passed away earlier this week from cancer. Lit Hub and Vulture both have touching tributes to her and her detective series starring Kinsey Millhone. "Grafton belonged to a cluster of female authors who viewed the private-detective subgenre, previously dominated by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Grafton’s own hero, Ross Macdonald, in desperate need of subverting" and "The annual release of her latest Kinsey Millhone novel was, for generations of devotees, one of the year’s premier literary events. " Rest in peace Ms. Grafton.