If you’re in New York this weekend, join Belladonna* and Kundiman for a celebration of what would have been the 60th birthday of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar). Nine poets, including Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Sina Queyras, and Anne Waldman, will perform a staged reading from Dictee, Cha’s best known work. There will be birthday cake, projected images, scholarly contextualization, and other surprises. Saturday March 5, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2pm.
Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
“A blood-sworn fan”
“So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it’s more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me.” Talking with Karen Russell.
Excerpt from Good on Paper
Rachel Cantor’s pub day for Good on Paper (included in our first-half preview) was this Tuesday. Check out an excerpt from the novel at Lit Hub.
●
●
Protest Con
Book Riot reports that Planned Parenthood “staged a protest of the GOP’s healthcare (or lack thereof) bill” with red-robed Handmaids. Pair with Tara Wanda Merrigan‘s review of the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s classic: “While transforming Offred into a stereotypically empowered representation of a woman may make the show more appealing to some viewers, I found it disheartening.”
●
●
Koestenbaum on Levé
Humiliation author Wayne Koestenbaum takes a page out of our own Mark O’Connell’s book to review Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait.
●
●
Citizen Bezos
Jeff Bezos married a novelist, “expressed a passionate devotion to books”, and may be the one person mild-mannered indie bookshop owners hate more than any other. How’d that happen? After perusing a short history from the New York Review of Books, see for yourself with our vintage news announcements on Amazon’s innovations in pay-per-page pricing, now-old products like the Kindle, and its industry-changing acquisitions of The Washington Post and the English language.
NYRB Winter Sale
From now until February 28th, you can grab New York Review of Books Classics titles at a steep discount.
King James
“He is the king, after all, and kings don’t lead revolutions. They rule wary of them.” Just about everything that Rowan Ricardo Phillips has to say about basketball is recommended reading at this point, and this piece on Lebron James and kingship is no different. This older piece on Steph Curry and the sustainability of brilliance is an early highlight.
●
●