Some kind soul has put the title story from Alvin Levin’s under-appreciated collection Love Is Like Park Avenue online for all to enjoy. That means you.
Highly Recommended
Here Refrain
Beautiful, shimmer, jetty. Poets Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Robert Pinsky et al. tell Merriam-Webster about their favorite words. Related, and far less pretty: the most-looked-up words post-election include fascism, bigot, and xenophobe.
●
●
Ancient Poetics
Recommended Reading: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen on translating ninth century poet Li Shangyin.
Get Outta Town, Pat Buchanan
“White Americans do not realize how black they are,” writes Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish. If, upon reading Sullivan, you find yourself questioning your racial identity, try the blog Stuff White People Like–sure, most of it is really stuff that dinks and yuppies like (class trumps race, as Walter Ben Michaels explains at the LRB), but it might help you brush up on the ways and loves of white folks: camping, pea coats, hating your parents, Wes Anderson, diversity, sushi, standing still at concerts…
Creeping Out the Invited Guests
It doesn’t get much better than James Wood on Joy Williams: “Nothing is stranger (and funnier) in Williams’s work than her details. Like her forms, they only resemble conventional realist details, an atmosphere perhaps encouraged by her flat, functional sentences (“They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink”). The details are frequently surreal, magical, hallucinogenic, delivered in a cool, dispassionate, routine manner.”
Plea of Innocence
Recommended Reading: On the ethics of self-publishing or: Can a convicted serial killer publish his version of the story?
Losing It
“These writers project a mythos of healing. Their work says to the world, ‘Yes, we go on in spite of the troubles and we heal. Our stories are stories of braveness and healing. We got this.’ But I don’t got this! I’m trying to affect a calm tone. I’m losing my shit.” Luke B. Goebel reflects on anxiety, medication, and creativity at Catapult. Gila Lyons, similarly, writes on how medication affected her creative life.
●
●