Kyle Minor (In the Devil’s Territory) has written a delightful list of “Five Hazards of the Book Review Biz” for HTMLGiant.
On Book Reviews
Who Reviews the Reviewers?
Our own Lydia Kiesling discusses James Wood’s literary “lodestars,” and also looks at “what is fascinating, if not exactly fun” about The Fun Stuff, the critic’s latest essay collection.
The New New Inquiry
The New Inquiry's updated site launched over the weekend, and it's currently undergoing a live beta test. They've also just unveiled a bumper crop of new bloggers. One of the site's interesting features is that all of its content is available for sharing and remixing under a creative commons license.
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Following the Refugees
Foreign Policy tracks refugees on their journey from Syria to Germany and illustrates their trip in a nonfiction comic.
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Bad from Good
Sometimes good writers write very badly. As evidence, Literary Hub has collected samples of bad writing from the likes of Year in Reading alum Isaac Fitzgerald and Daniel Clowes, who we interviewed here.
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“How like a prison is my cubicle…”
In May, poet David Lehman wrote the first line of a sonnet about cubicle anomie and began crowdsourcing the rest. The completed 12-week project at The American Scholar is not merely a pretty great piece on its own, but a lesson in how to write one, line by line: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8/9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. You can submit your title suggestion as late as midnight on Sunday, but we suggest getting a start on it now, while the prison of work is still fresh in mind. (h/t The New York Times)
The Problem with “Brave”
On odd reading habits, the problem with "brave" writing and being a writer in LA: an interview with Meghan Daum, whose essay collection The Unspeakable was reviewed by our own Hannah Gersen.
Save the Languages
Researchers at Comanche Nation College and Texas Tech University are creating a digital archive to reconstruct the Comanche language before its 25 remaining speakers die out. Meanwhile, researchers from Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences have recorded audio and video footage of twenty isolated Alaskans who speak a unique form of the Russian language. (Bonus: An Australian researcher recently uncovered a whole new Aboriginal dialect.)
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