While calling for the preservation of the wonderful St. Marks Bookshop, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein explains that “magazines like The Paris Review need good bookstores, where the staff knows how to spread the word about good writing, face to face, hand to hand.”
Why Bookstores Are Needed
2013 Kundiman Poetry Prize
Kundiman, an organization dedicated to “the creation and cultivation of Asian American poetry,” is now accepting submissions for its annual Kundiman Poetry Prize. One winner will receive $1,000, book publication with Alice James Books, and a featured reading in New York City. The deadline is March 1, 2013.
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Negative Theology
Anthony Domestico writes on negative theology in the works of Joy Williams and Mary Rakow at Commonweal Magazine. Our own Nick Ripatrazone offers 50 reasons why you should read Joy Williams.
Leap Before You Look
Can the art of teaching art actually be exhibited? A new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston about the one-time Asheville, NC institution Black Mountain College asks just such questions. Black Mountain College was a controversial, short-lived bastion of free-thought and artistic expression which hosted such figures as Josef Albers, John Cage, and Robert Creeley from 1933 to 1957.
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Jane Austen Goes Electric
Helen Lewis looks at how recent film and TV adaptations of Jane Austen books serve surprising, acerbic takes on the author's well-known works.
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Six Plots Part II
I’ve written before about Matthew Jockers‘s claim, as reported and presented by the Paris Review, that there are only about 6 plots in fiction. Now Dan Piepenbring returns to the Review to respond to critics who and attempt to answer the questions “is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms?”
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Civil War Lit Reconsidered
While there may not be any great literature from the Civil War period about the war itself, the war did leave an indelible mark on some of the great American writers toiling at the time. Craig Fehrman explores the topic at The Boston Globe.
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