In the wake of the Sandusky scandal, the Penn State alumni mag Penn Stater couldn’t ignore the news. The dark, shattered cover is not what you typically see from booster-ish alumni magazines.
When an Alumni Mag Covers Bad News
Melodious Sound Patterings
“Reaching the end of a Babstock poem, I often felt (and still often feel) stunned into a kind of numinous awe.” Stewart Cole for Partisan on Ken Babstock and the state of Canadian poetry. Continue with confidence on your quest through the Canadian canon with the help of this guide by our very own Michael Bourne.
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Crowdsourcing Translation
Three thousand Russians volunteered to proofread “forty-six thousand eight hundred pages” of Leo Tolstoy’s writings over the course of fourteen days. Soon their efforts will be available online for all to see. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is catching some heat for enlisting the services of unpaid Duolingo students in order to translate site content for Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese readers.
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HBO Is Having Leftovers
According to sources for Vulture, HBO has ordered a television pilot based on Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, which “takes place in a world still reeling from a Rapture-like event three years earlier.” The project will be managed by Lost co-producer Damon Lindelof.
“There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention.”
If you’ve finished reading David Mitchell’s latest short story – which was published on Twitter last week and then ran on our site five days ago – you’ll appreciate Ian Crouch’s look at its greater meaning, and what it could mean for Twitter as a whole.
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Marlon James’s Minnesota
"In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. ...Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica." Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, which once gave me so much trouble, and whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings the Book Report covered here, writes for the New York Times Magazine about leaving Jamaica to find himself in Minnesota.