Edgar Allen Poe’s House on The Wire
Told By An Idiot
There are few better ways to spice up a Monday morning than with a Shakespearean choose-your-own adventure story. If it please thee, proceed to McSweeney’s. Then come back to The Millions and check out these pieces on the Bard.
The Literate Frontman
Some of Jeff Tweedy‘s favorite writers: “I like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut. . . . I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free.” (In a Rolling Stone interview, unavailable online.)
Least Favorite “Great Books”
Elif Batuman, Francine Prose, and Lorin Stein are among the critics, authors, and editors who reveal their least favorite “great books.”
Color in Poetry
Recommended reading: “What is Color in Poetry” by Dorothea Lasky for Poetry. It’s a lengthy article but a thoughtful one, and, as a bonus, it includes some of Lasky’s childhood poetry. Pair with our earlier post about reading teenage poetry to crowds and you’ve got a theme for the day.
Desconocido
Why do Americans read so few translated works? A lot of reasons come to mind, but one is that translated books are often the purview of small publishers, who don’t have the same marketing budgets as the larger companies in the industry. At The New Yorker’s Currency blog, Vauhini Vara looks at the statistics compiled by Three Percent, a database at the University of Rochester that tracks publications of translated works in the country. Related: Oliver Farry’s interview with the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.
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