The NBCC finalists will be announced tonight at an event in New York City, and you’re invited! The event will feature drinks, hors d’ouevre, and (probably) a lot of reading glasses.
NBCC Finalist Party
Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, poet laureate of the river
There are poet laureates for all sorts of things these days – Queens Borough, San Mateo County, Twitter, you name it – but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone being dubbed “poet laureate of the river.”
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Speak Up
This graphic account of the uncomfortable on-stage conversation between Roxane Gay and Erica Jong at this year’s Decatur Book Festival comes from MariNaomi over at Electric Literature. Here are a few essays from The Millions that also deal with race, fatherhood, and fiction.
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Just Stop There
What do Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood have in common? They’re all great writers -- and they all had only one kid.
Once Upon a Time In Japan
You will not want to miss this possibly true ghost story from David Mitchell over at LitHub. This piece comes from the first installment of Freeman’s, which is out now, and which includes such fantastic writers as Mitchell, Haruki Murakami, and Louise Erdrich.
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Thoughts of a Hand-Wringer
If you were to guess (no cheating) the author of a new essay on hypochondria, who would you guess? Larry David? Calvin Trillin? Or someone a little more... nebbishy?
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Reading in Prison
"[H]is authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books." Alex Halberstadt writes about "A Prisoner's Reading List" for The New Yorker. It's available online, and soon a lot more New Yorker articles will be too.
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Writing to Explain Yourself to Yourself
The Tide King author Jen Michalski shares a wonderfully honest account of how she managed to write her way out of the closet. “People, mostly nonwriters, are always surprised when I tell them I wrote so much growing up,” she says. “But those words, I want to tell them, weren’t written for anyone else – the audience who needed to see them and the audience for whom they were written was me.”
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