Chinese Publishing

This has nothing to do with books, but if you’re like me, it’s important, life-altering, and worthy of constant news coverage: The Girl Scouts are releasing a new cookie for their 100th Anniversary. The lemony “Savannah Smiles” will commemorate the Scouts’ southern roots. Need help tracking down a box? I suggest the Girl Scout Cookie Locator app for your smartphone.

“[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.” A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn’t nearly as much of a recluse as we’ve been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which “transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.”

Sometimes, when you read a lot of work by a single writer, you end up writing unconscious imitations of their work. The reliability of this effect raises an ourobouric possibility: what if you reviewed a writer’s fiction in their own style? At The Awl, Sarah Marian Seltzer reviews Henry James as Henry James. You could also read Charles-Adam Foster-Simard on binge-reading James’s fiction.

Simms Taback, the children’s author and illustrator known for his version of There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, has died at age 79.

“There is no such thing as a true story. I know this because my daughter insists I told her to put her dirty dishes in the sink when I know I told her to put them in the dishwasher.” Over at The Rumpus, Ellen Urbani writes about telling the truth.