At The Collagist, Kyle Beachy imagines the emperor Augustus saying to the poet Horace, “You and your kind are fucked!” “The Extent of Our Decline” is one of number of essays appearing in the collection I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, coming in March from Soft Skull.
Cursing at Poets
Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: “I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character.”
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Remembering Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa, literary translator and professor at Queens College, died this past week. Rabassa helped introduce Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, among others, to English-language readers. He was 94 years old.
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The Alligators of Abraham
You can listen to Robert Kloss read from The Alligators of Abraham, which was released last Thursday from Mud Luscious Press. The author also composed a playlist to accompany his book. The gorgeous text has been receiving much-deserved advance praise, and it’s even borne a “series of texts – videos, art, stories, and more – written, filmed, cobbled together, and razed by different artists from around the literary world.”
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Who is Sham Blanderson?
“Sham Blanderson,” presumably the book critic for Moo Pork Magazine, is posting the best sentence he reads each day on Twitter.
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The Two Percent
What would happen if two percent of the world’s population disappeared overnight? HBO’s new teaser for its adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers asks us to contemplate that question. From what we see so far, it looks terrifying. The series premieres on June 15.
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Steinbeck the Spy
When John Steinbeck wasn’t busy writing 600-page novels, he might have been a Cold War CIA spy. In 1952, Steinbeck approached the CIA and suggested he could do some spying on an upcoming European trip. “The pace and method of my junket together with my intention of talking with great numbers of people of all classes may offer peculiar advantages,” he wrote to an agent.
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