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)
Wide Sargasso Theory
This year, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle for their groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic.
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A Proper Sociopath
Last week, I pointed readers to a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch on BBC Radio, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman explains why Cumberbatch is the story’s ideal reader, unpacking his “withering, perfectly enunciated deadpan.”
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“What’s today?”
Recommended Reading: James Galvin’s “Bet,” which was selected as The Missouri Review’s poem of the week.
I Slide and Slide
“In the dark comes spiders out of art and first I’m sleuthed away. Measuring up the vying worlds. Meandering into the emphasised words but under neat speeches are oceanous platitudes and so I slide and slide.” An exclusive excerpt from Year in Reading alumna Eimear McBride’s new novel, The Lesser Bohemians, in The Times Literary Supplement.
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A Little Light Weekend Reading
Need some short story recommendations to carry you through the weekend? Elliott Holt’s got 63 of them. Cheat sheet: You can read her first, second, and third recommendations free online.
Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
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