The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation features a symposium on the work of the late David Foster Wallace, featuring essays by Edie Meidav, Lance Olsen, and Andrew Altschul…plus Scott Esposito‘s welcome defense of Infinite Jest‘s canonization.
DFW Festchrift at The Quarterly Conversation
Add Poems to Your Curriculum
Are you familiar with “Teach This Poem“? If not you should be. This organization just won the National Book Foundation’s 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize. Their literary social impact mission? Help teachers add poetry to their curriculum; “Each week, The Academy of American Poets emails out a poem along with interdisciplinary information — classroom discussion questions and multimedia offerings like maps, videos, photography, and related reading suggestions. Everything is curated to help teachers incorporate poetry into the classroom experience.” Find out more about the prize and the org here.
Short Stories for your Kindle
Torpedo, the beautifully designed and illustrated Australian fiction quarterly that has featured Jim Shepard, Sheila Heti, Clancy Martin, and yours truly, now becomes the first of its kind to be fully Kindled. Copies are $2.99 here.
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Curiosities
This just in! Senator Barack Obama has “palled around” with the notorious constitutionalist Richard Posner.The good folks at Hotel St. George Press interview Taryn Simon, the artist behind the brilliant Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.Jonathan Franzen’s remembrance of David Foster Wallace is quite moving……as are the Elizabeth Bishop stanzas that conclude this sterling essay on her lifelong correspondence with Robert Lowell.Alas, the only way to offer you recollections of the late George Plimpton was to link to The Daily Beast.That long profile in Rolling Stone of DFW by David Lipsky that everyone’s been talking about is now online.Venerable fishwrap The Christian Science Monitor goes online only with its daily edition.Ten of the best circadian novels: “novels that fit all their action into a single day.”Sarah Palin and code-switchingWe may never tire of “This Is Just to Say” parodies.Our revels, not quite ended?: Royal Shakespeareans read celebrity porno dialogue (headphones recommended for those at work).Half a year late, Russia! Magazine has made its translation guide to Russian literature available online.Over at More Intelligent Life, you can find an audio interview with a Booker Prize judge.Finally, MiL‘s parent publication, The Economist makes its endorsement.
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“I wanted to write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling.”
Tom Murphy, arguably Ireland’s greatest living playwright, joins The Paris Review for an interview about his life, his influences, and his rage.
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Sullivan on Ska
Who invented ska music? John Jeremiah Sullivan traces the history of the genre in his latest essay for The Oxford American. “The more the claims for Rosco Gordon’s supremacy as a ska progenitor seem not out of proportion, and the less crazy it feels to say that, in a sense, ska was born in Tennessee.” Pair with: Sullivan’s essay on Bunny Wailer, who makes a cameo in his ska essay.
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Move Over, Paula Deen
The late Colonel Harland Sanders (of Kentucky Fried Chicken notoriety) is the author of a newly unearthed manuscript “chock full of homespun anecdotes and life lessons from Sanders, who struck it rich late in life. It also includes a heaping helping of his favorite personal recipes.” The manuscript will be published online within the next year.
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