The Tournament of Books declares a winner! It was down to two in the last round: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (called “big, messy, flawed, enraging, and engrossing” by C. Max Magee, one of the final round judges) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (which “ached with feeling and tension…”) Find out who won at The Morning News!
The Tournament of Books Declares a Winner!
Writers on Reading
How do writers read? Elisa Gabbert asked ten writers, including Teju Cole and Laura Van Den Berg (who wrote about her pet wolf Natasha for The Millions), about their reading habits for The Believer.
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London, Beachside
Folks in London, England–well, technically Greenwich–could have their very own custom-built beach for the next five years.
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Mr. E.L. James
Neil Leonard, husband of 50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James, is penning a YA novel.
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Hope in the Dark
“Most of all, they don’t tell you that fear, to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis, will feel so like grief, and so you begin to mourn what you have not yet lost, because mourning prematurely is the only way to protect yourself from hope.” For Catapult, Laura Turner writes about her trio of miscarriages and the hope she lost (and found) along the way. (Turner is a 2017 Year in Reading alum).
W.S. Merwin named as 17th Poet Laureate of the USA
W.S. Merwin, a Hawaii-based poet born in 1927, has been named the 17th Poet Laureate of the United States. A fellow poet writes, “There is something monklike about Merwin … He is trying to achieve a contemplative distance from desire and ambition.”
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On Representation
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