Congratulations to the NYPL for restoring $36.7 million of the city’s proposed $40 million budget cut. Today also marks the first day of new NYPL president Anthony Marx. (Pro-tip: when you want to skip the wait list for a popular book, reserve the large-print version!)
A Big Week for the NYPL
I Hope Not
Is it time to tax the internet?
Your friendly neighborhood poet laureate
A while back, we reviewed an anthology of work by American poets laureate--that is, those appointed by the President to serve the entire United States. But there are 45 currently-serving state poets laureate, and thousands of city, county, and other poets laureate as well. What exactly do they do?
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RIP John Ashbery
The New York Times is reporting that the poet John Ashbery has died. A major figure in American letters, Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in a single year for his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The full Times obituary has more.
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“Let the past collapse at the right time”
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Ice Trilogy author Vladimir Sorokin looks at the current events related to Ukraine, Russia, and Crimea, and notes that “the Russian state’s ‘vertical power’ structure” (which is to say “monarchical structure”) is what keeps the Russian people held “hostage to the psychosomatic quirks of its leader.”
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Matthiessen’s Beginnings
In memory of Peter Matthiessen, The Missouri Review has unlocked an interview with him from 1989. Matthiessen detailed the beginning of his writing career. "I started my first novel and sent off about four chapters and waited by the post office for praise to roll in, calls from Hollywood, everything. Finally my agent sent me a letter that said 'Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this a hundred and fifty years ago, only he wrote it better. Yours, Bernice.' I probably needed that; it was very healthy." For more Matthiessen, you can read one of his best travel essays or his new novel, In Paradise.
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Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction." Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
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The Family
Recommended Reading (National Prayer Breakfast edition): Jeff Sharlet's terrifying, timely The Family.
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Yeah, good work closing the gap NYPL. Are you going to double the late fees and cut the borrowing period to two weeks or just add a zero to the fake fines that show up on my account?