The New York Times issues a correction note for something they’ve been messing up for 25 years.
Perennial Errata
Hints of Granite
Recommended Reading: Charles Simic on drinking wine in New Hampshire.
Interview With Charles McNair
Over at Bloom today, a lively Q&A with Charles McNair, whose Pickett's Charge was the subject of Kevin Hartnett's recent review here. In particular, McNair takes us through the harrowing blow by blow of his road to publication, the "sophomore jinx story" from a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author.
It’s Not Nothing
We’ve published a fair number of essays about the writing process and its discontents. In Bookforum, Anne Boyer tackles the natural complement to literary work, in an excerpt of her new Garments Against Women. Her subject? The art of not writing.
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Poetry Wounds
“Ocean Vuong is that rare architect of accommodation, giving the most precarious situations or embarrassing of grievances of our culture a sound environment in which they can thrive. As he kisses and tucks the parents in their beds, he sets out from the wreckage of his past towards a hard-won horizon of blunder and wonderment.” Jeff Nguyen reviews Vuong’s newest poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
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Zadie Smith wins The Moth Award
Last week Zadie Smith, acclaimed novelist and Year in Reading alum, was presented with The Moth Award for storytelling. She gave a charming acceptance speech, video of which can be found here, and we definitely recommend watching!
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You May Call Me Bobby, Or You May Call Me Zimmy
In more "Dylan at 70" news, the knowledgeable Ed Ward reviews the compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan for The Oxford American. (Editor's Note: The omission from this album of Nina Simone's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and Ben E. King's "Lay Lady Lay" are both unconscionable.)
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Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition -- as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex -- in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was "more than one person.”