Paul Muldoon raised this season’s commencement bar with his address to Bennington College’s Writing Seminar graduates. At The Russian Samovar a few months ago, before reading from Maggot, he explained the phrase “cock a snook.”
Muldoon’s Commencement Address
Is There Life on Pallas?
John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar isn’t the only vintage science fiction novel making waves this week. Andrew Joron takes a look at “German fantasist” Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio – a 1913 novel that was recently reissued by the folks at Wakefield Press.
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The Lonely Sidewalk-Man
Recommended (Hilarious) Reading: Mallory Ortberg from The Toast gives you every noir story set in Los Angeles in helpful, bulleted format.
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Amazon responds to Hachette furor
Amazon, whose tense negotiations with Hachette in the past months have led them to slow ship-times for its books, offered last night "to fund 50% of an author pool—to be allocated by Hachette—to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%." Of course, Hachette may find calculating and allocating damages awkward so soon after authors flexed their social-media muscle. Sidebar: Amazon claimed "989 of 1000" items sold would be unaffected by this continuing "business interruption," which might mean a full 1.1 percent of their business comes from just one mid-sized traditional publisher—heartening news from an unlikely source.
A Frank Poet
"Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. / Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling." Last week, Ocean Vuong published his newest collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. This week, it seems to be all anyone can talk about (because it's fantastic). Here's a piece from The New Yorker on Vuong and his designs for the English language.
The Puddlies
Powell's Books announces their Puddly Awards. Vote for your favorite book of the last decade.
The New Great Books
"How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?" Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
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True Romance
"Dive bars are full of beautiful dreamers." True or false? If you answered true, you might be a romantic. Take Daniel Handler's quiz to determine whether you're prone to romance or cynicism, and then plan your Valentine's Day accordingly.
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Reading Rainbow Forever & Always
For every reader who grew up enamored with LeVar Burton's now-cancelled PBS show, Reading Rainbow, there's fresh hope. A Kickstarter campaign to create a spin-off, web-based version of Reading Rainbow that aims to spread literacy to children in under-served schools was launched yesterday and has already received a significant portion of its funding goal. While there are some concerns about the project, the nostalgia factor is incredibly strong, and who doesn't want to spread the love of reading to children?
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