New York City’s municipal grid turns 200 this year. To commemorate, author and Year in Reading alumna Belinda McKeon notes the way New Yorkers utilize it as they “don’t wander so much as dart” from place to place.
An Irish Take on the NYC Grid
Exploring the 92nd Street Y’s Digital Archive
Audio for over 10,000 events – including concerts, poetry readings, and public interviews – is being made available on the 92nd Street Y’s new digital archive. Among the treasures in the trove are readings by Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, and Susan Sontag. (Thanks Andrew.)
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Virginia Woolf Gazes Backward
Lauren Groff takes a closer look at Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, which has a noticeably different tone than her other books.
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Master of Happy Scenes
Norman Rockwell was an unhappy and enervated man who became iconic by painting scenes of happy, energetic people. He developed a style that became synonymous with idyllic visions of America. At Page-Turner, Lee Siegel reads Deborah Solmon’s American Mirror, a new biography of Rockwell that acknowledges the painter’s contradictions without “mocking or scolding” him for the gulf between his life and his art.
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Who Should Readers Root For In The Super Bowl?
Need a team to root for during today’s Super Bowl? Might I suggest cheering on the team that represents a city angling to become America’s second UNESCO City of Literature? (Related: A few months back, Krakow, Poland, became the seventh city to join the UNESCO bunch.)
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New from Diane Williams
In the most recent issue of Pank, read new fiction from Diane Williams. We review her collection Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty.
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Out of the Rain
The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek root nostos, meaning “return home,” and algos, or “pain.” It’s painful because we cannot return home again. Ramp up the nostalgia and check out this elegy to the old school book tour by Keith Lee Morris. If we’re talking book tours, here’s a piece on the distinct personality types sure to derail your literary event.
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“Life, friends, is boring”
“These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses.” At The Rumpus, a memory of falling in love with The Dream Songs (which happens to nicely complement a piece we published back in April).
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