Revisiting Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen and what constitutes as an acceptable author bio.
Revisiting Vanessa Veselka
What your next-beach-umbrella neighbor is reading
Yes, but what’s everyone else reading this summer? Bookstores in beach towns know better than to stock “business, personal finance, or diet” books–though poetry does pretty well–but they are looking forward to these bestsellers. The print-disinclined can take heart that there are even a fair number of literary movies coming out soon. (Related: our own recommended summer reading list, also blessedly personal finance-free.)
“Neither Tarnished Nor Afraid”
“Being nominated for an award feels the way I imagine winning the lottery must feel: You’re deeply grateful and a little disoriented, you feel very lucky, and you know that it could just as easily have been someone else.” Our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about “the vast distance between literary prizes and literary work” and reading Norman Mailer for The Atlantic‘s By Heart series (which we’ve covered many, many times before).
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The Class of 2013
The Public Domain Review takes a look at the “Class of 2013,” a k a their “top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain.” Among the names highlighted is Robert Musil, whose novel The Man Without Qualities was reviewed on our site by Matthew Gallaway.
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Olga Slavnikova on Reading Roulette
The Morning News continues its ongoing Reading Roulette series by sharing “A Light Head” by Olga Slavnikova. While the author is a contender for the 2013 Russian Booker Prize, TMN correspondent Elizabeth Kiem doesn’t need to wait to award “best line” to this little ditty: “The Russian dilemma posed by Dostoyevsky—‘Shall I let the world go to hell or skip my tea?’—has been resolved in favor of the tea.”
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“Rainbow Potato Day” Has a Nice Ring
Gaia, Pale Blue Dot, Lonely Planet, etc… It’s time for a new addition to Earth’s list of aliases: the rainbow potato. A new map of our planet’s gravity field reveals the variations in gravitational pull depending on your geographic location.
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Cowboys and Indians?
“Even if they have to fly to Pakistan to do it, our cowboys are always hunting Indians.” Amira Jarmakani on the perpetuation of Wild West stories even though our idea of the frontier has changed.
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