Just in time for crawfish season (and ruined outfits as a result of crawfish season), The Oxford American‘s launched its newest column, Parish Chic, brought to you by L. Kasimu Harris. It’s meant to prominently showcase the beaucoup styles on display in New Orleans, Harris’ hometown. You can read about the project’s background and inspiration over at Gambit: The Best of New Orleans.
Haute Bayou
Cuba’s Newest Voices
Recommended Reading: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo collected sixteen short stories from sixteen authors among Cuba’s “Generación Año Cero” (Generation Year Zero), which is a “movement of writers who began publishing in 2000.” The anthology, which is available for free online in both English and Spanish, features illustrations from Cuban artists El Sexto and Luis Trápaga.
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Is She a Betty or a Veronica?
Lena Dunham is the new voice of the Archie comics generation. The Girls creator will write four issues of the famous comic, coming out in 2015. She’s not the only woman joining the comics industry. DC Comics is adding a Native American teenage girl, inspired by the real Canadian Aboriginal teen activist Shannen Koostachin, to the Justice League United.
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“I have always wondered.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Diary” for the Financial Times features the Mars Curiosity, Quaker school songs, and all sorts of family bonding.
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Words & Symbols
Mairead Small Staid writes on the history and poetics of the ampersand, “a logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all.”
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Bert and Ernie’s Wedding Plans
Sesame Workshop has released an official statement to address calls for Bert and Ernie to marry each other.
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Sublimely Bad?
Are you lover or writer of florid longwinded codswollop? The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest might be for you.
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New Releases: Crichton, Jin, Bolaño
This week brings the release of Michael Crichton’s posthumously published tale of the high seas, Pirate Latitudes and A Good Fall, a new collection of stories by Ha Jin. Also out recently is Melville House’s Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview.
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Nabokov Pitches Hitchcock
Remember that time Vladimir Nabokov pitched Alfred Hitchcock a melodramatic love story about a girl and an astronaut? No? Read all about it.