Looking for some new poetry? Inferno author Eileen Myles pens a ringing endorsement of Erica Kaufman’s Instant Classic. The book has “haunted and befuddled” her for over a year, she writes.
Inferno (A Poet’s Recommendation)
“Wounded Women”
“I am worried about the implications of throwing the label ‘women’s pain’ around individual experiences of suffering, and I am even more uncomfortable with women who feel free to speak for all women. I worry about making pain a ticket to gain entry into the women’s club. And I worry that the assumption of vulnerability threatens to invigorate just the sexist evils it aims to combat by demanding that men serve as shields against it.” In an essay for the Boston Review, Jessa Crispin shares her concerns about the “wounded women” trend in literature right now, citing Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams and Roxane Gay‘s Bad Feminist as well the Twitter campaign #yesallwomen as particular examples. Pair with Ryan Teitman‘s Millions review of The Empathy Exams.
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Comfort Food: Rock Memoir Edition
Alex Stone reviews Guns N’ Roses founding member Duff McKagan’s memoir, It’s So Easy. It’s a book, Stone writes, that’s “intoxicating — in a pancreas-wrenching sort of way.” Bonus: McKagan’s Year in Reading for our site back in 2011.
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Foetry Chronicles
Brett Ortler, a blogger at Bark, chronicles his effort to figure out why indie publisher, BlazeVOX, wants to charge him $250 to publish his book of poems. Follow-up posts reveal, first, that BlazeVOX has rescinded the pay-to-play scheme, and, second, that it now plans to go out of business by the end of the year.
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Children of the East
Following its interview with Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Bookforum published its review of the author’s debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase. As in many other books that take place in the post-Cold War age, the plot centers on a group of Ukrainian immigrants, fresh out of the former Soviet Union, who set up new lives in America. However, despite the subject matter, it’s a bit too reductive, Chloé Cooper-Jones writes, to classify the book as an immigrant novel. For more on the book, read Matthew Wolfson’s Millions review.
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Renowned Cuban Poet Resigns from Nation’s Association of Writers and Artists
Rafael Alcides Perez, one of Cuba’s most renowned poets and public intellectuals, has resigned from the Association of Cuban Writers and Artists because of “government restrictions he is being subjected to,” reports the Havana Times. You can read some of his work (in Spanish) over here, here, and here.
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Since You Asked
Recommended Reading: On terrible writing advice from famous writers.
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