The 3 Quarks Daily annual prize for Arts and Literature blog writing has been announced! Nominations are open in the comments of the announcement. This year’s judge is author, professor, blogger, intellect Laila Lalami. Dear readers, feel free to nominate any Millions writing you enjoyed here. And to the guest contributors out there, be sure to nominate your Millions contributions!
The 3 Quarks Daily annual Arts and Literature Prize!
Ready Your Bookmarks, Ladies and Gentlemen
Hear ye, hear ye! The annual Morning News Tournament of Books has begun! (ICYMI: I wrote about their bracket last week.)
Writing Literary Twitter
“Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems and essays, the books we sell, the magazines we edit: all this output, this paper expelled out to the world, the screens we invade with our narratives, it all matters to us. But does it matter to everyone else?” mensah demary writes about the good, the bad, and the slightly neurotic of being a writer on Twitter for Electric Literature.
Found in Florence
“It was just one small sign in a bustling city. But it was a sign, nevertheless, that Florence has not forgotten the Brownings after all.” In the New York Times, novelist Ann Mah explored Florence looking for signs of the literary couple who called it home for many years: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. From our archives: a more sober look at the famed city.
The Alfar
If you run into trouble in Iceland, blame the elves. 54.4 percent of Icelanders believe in the invisible creatures, and elves cause environmental protest today. “Beliefs in misfortune befalling those who dare to build in elf territory is so widespread and frequent that the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration has created a five-page ‘standard reply’ for press inquiries about elves,” Ryan Jacobs writes for The Atlantic. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
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Welcome, Kirstin!
The Millions is thrilled to welcome Kirstin Butler as our new Social Media Manager. Kirstin got her start in books at the Harvard Book Store and has worked on projects for Slate, MTV Networks, and a variety of other outlets. She’s a writer with bylines at places like The Atlantic and The New Republic, and a novel is in the works. Find her online here, and of course, on The Millions‘ feeds.
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“Big, though, big head”
Last week marked the release of The Heart is Strange, a new collection of John Berryman poems released to coincide with the centenary of the poet’s birth. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring digs through the magazine’s interview archives to find Berryman’s account of meeting W.B. Yeats. Pair with: Stephen Akey on Berryman’s classic The Dream Songs.
Tom Hanks Joins Dave Eggers Adaptation
Tom Hanks and Cloud Atlas director Tom Tykwer are reuniting for a cinematic adaptation of Dave Eggers’s Hologram for the King. Previously Walkmen lead singer Hamilton Leithauser named Eggers’s book in his most recent Year in Reading post.
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