Well, this is awkward. When the National Book Foundation announced its nominees last week for the Young People’s Literature category of the National Book Awards, they accidentally picked a book called Shine by Lauren Myracle when they really meant to pick Franny Billingsley’s Chime.
Nominating the Wrong Book
News That Stays News
“Yes, they believed I was a dangerous person, unpredictable, and I observed that I really scared them. Sometimes I noted that the guards looked at me as judges. Their look translated to me as ‘gorilla, stay in your cage!’ When soldiers were off-duty, they came to gawk at me with a sense of wonder. Sometime they would throw me a piece of meat or something sweet, just like to an animal. The old EZ: an exciting and fascinating sight.” Ezra Pound reflects on his time in an Italian prison.
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The Poor Mouth
You’ve likely heard that artists these days are in trouble. The probability that your average creative person will make a living from their art is getting smaller by the day. But amidst all this hand-wringing, we forget one simple fact — it’s always been getting worse, and there’s always been something killing culture. At Slate, Evan Kindley writes about Scott Timberg’s new book Culture Crash, asking whether the Internet is really the dread force it’s often made out to be.
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Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.
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The Stand on Screen
Getting a director for Stephen King’s The Stand was almost as difficult as surviving the virus. The latest director to try is Josh Boone, who is no stranger to adaptations because he’s bringing The Fault in Our Stars to screen. To brush up on your King, read our essay on learning about America through his novels.
Getting Turned On
December 26, 1962 marked the first time that Playboy Magazine ever used the phrase “turn-on.” Since then, humans have conceived of a remarkable variety of metaphor and colorful language in an attempt to try and make some sense of copulation. Over at Hazlitt, Chelsea G. Summers takes a close look at the increasingly electric language of sex. Unsurprisingly, sex is never far from the mind of a literary writer, either.
“Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you.”
Recommended Reading: Roger Angell describes life in the nineties. His nineties.
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Post-Maidan
Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
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