50th Anniversary of “Silent Spring”

This year’s Forward Prize went to the poet Jorie Graham, whose collection The Dream of the Unified Field won the Pulitzer in ’94. Graham is the first American woman to win the prize.

Unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s  The Little Prince have been unearthed, and they contain clues to a political reading of the children’s classic.

“John Milton—poet, free speech advocate, civil servant, classics scholar—was arguably a forefather to Asimov, Bradbury, Delaney, and the rest. Their outlandish other worlds owe a debt to his visionary mode of storytelling; their romance—characters who go on quests, encounter adversaries at portals, channel the forces of light and dark—is his, too.” Over at Slate, Katy Waldman makes the argument for Milton as sci-fi author. Pair with our discussion of his epic Paradise Lost as part of this piece about difficult books.