Wallace Stevens Week(s) begin with a sprint today at Big Other, featuring an interview with poet and critic James Longenbach, an essay on Stevens’ other work, in insurance, and a list of his “most maddening, funny and bizarre” titles.
Wallace Stevens Week
River Phoenix’s Final Film
In 1993, River Phoenix was working on Dark Blood, an independent film that was supposed to be the underdog surprise of the year. But when Phoenix died three weeks before shooting was supposed to wrap, the project stopped in its tracks. Now, almost 20 years later, the original director and editor are piecing the bits together, and they plan on screening it at the Netherlands Film Festival in September.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Lethem; Lasdun; Khalifa; Prose; Correa; Macy; Hajdu; Chung
New this week: A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem; The Fall Guy by James Lasdun; No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa; Mister Monkey by Francine Prose; The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa; Truevine by Beth Macy; Love for Sale by David Hajdu; and The Loved Ones by our own Sonya Chung. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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“To me, Godspeed is more than just a band, it’s an idea.”
Canadian post-rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor will soon release their fourth studio album, ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, and it’s definitely worth checking out. You can stream the record over here. The band was also recently interviewed for The Guardian, too, and this entire post should keep you occupied for a while.
Counterproductive Categorization
It’s a question that puzzles writers of all stripes: why is so much academic writing so terrible? It’s an issue that’s been a lifelong head-scratcher for the linguist Steven Pinker, who set out to answer the question once and for all. His verdict? It has to do with the meaning of “literary style.”
What troubles me are the silences in my own memory.
In remembrance of Adrienne Rich, who died just this past March, Vida has published 21 love poems.
Fake Pill City
In his new book, Pill City, journalist Kevin Deutsch set out to tell the real story of how, following the 2015 Baltimore riots, Charm City’s streets became flush with heroin and pills. But now local writers are raising serious questions about the veracity of Deutsch’s account. Among others, The Wire creator David Simon has called the book “a wholesale fabrication.” Last week, Newsday announced they were “reviewing Deutsch’s work over the four years he worked here,” and the New York Times, where Deutsch has contributed, followed suit.
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Ghosts of Novels
It’s always disappointing when your novel fails to get published, but what if that novel were still lurking online? At The New York Times, Jason K. Friedman writes about finding the Amazon and Google links for his novel that never made it to print. “Google admits, ‘We haven’t found any reviews in the usual places,’ which in this case would be the planet Earth.” Pair with: Our own Edan Lepucki’s essay on how to cope with not selling your novel.