“The reader emerges … refreshed but crippled”

This week brings the release of Michael Crichton's posthumously published tale of the high seas, Pirate Latitudes and A Good Fall, a new collection of stories by Ha Jin. Also out recently is Melville House's Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview.

If you're a professor or mentor, it's the time of year you should expect to be hit up for recommendation letters. You can find inspiration in Ralph Waldo Emerson's recommendation letter for Walt Whitman, when the latter was seeking government employment despite his controversial poetry. "He is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends." Even if the government didn't like Whitman's work, we do; read our own Michael Bourne's essay on the power of Whitman's poetry.

“Hell-bent on researching the most microscopic pieces of a layered family history, Charles Ward burrows deeply into Old Providence. Lovecraft’s meticulous scene-setting is answered in the graphic novel with Ian Culbard drafting stately mansion exteriors and farmhouses in simple, slender strokes and never lending them more than two or three tones from his understated color palette.” On a graphic novel treatment of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Since we just can’t seem to get enough of the Shakespeare infographics, here’s another from Electric Literature. This time, it’s the characters and their web of interactions that gets the colorful, 21st century treatment. Last time, it was deaths. Forsooth, at least you probably won’t have to wait long for another one.

"What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization." An argument for bringing back the serialized novel in the spirit of Dickens, Thackeray and Arthur Conan Doyle from The Washington Post.