“All Sorts of Sports. Shall I play checkers? golf? croquet? There are so many games there are to play.” A never-before-seen Dr. Seuss manuscript, “All Sorts of Sports,” is up for auction. (via AuthorScoop)
Dr. Seuss Manuscript Surfaces
The First American Novel
“He is now even upon the point of marrying—shall I proceed!—of marrying his Sister! I fly to prevent incest!” Dan Piepenbring writes about reading The Power of Sympathy, America’s first novel, for The Paris Review.
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Alliteration Works, See?
Continuing her ongoing instructional column for The New York Times, Constance Hale gives some pointers on the sweet science of writing for the ear.
Zen State
Recommended Reading: Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’s poem “To Get to Zen” at Paper Darts. “you must first lose your/shit in an elevator/in front of a man you do not know.”
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The Rebellious English Major
In last week’s Brandeis commencement speech, Leon Wieseltier argued that never has there been a moment in American life when the humanities were respected less but needed more. “In recent years I have come to regard a commitment to the humanities as nothing less than an act of intellectual defiance, of cultural dissidence,” he said.
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Tough Sell
Did Patrick Modiano deserve the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature? Wrong question, our own Bill Morris writes in The Daily Beast. The right question is: Why is foreign fiction in translation still such a tough sell for American publishers?
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