Chinua Achebe, best known for his novel Things Fall Apart, is working on a memoir to be titled There Was a Country.
Achebe Memoir on the Way
Twerking with Morgan Freeman
You might have heard that “twerk” (among other words) has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. But you probably didn’t hear Morgan Freeman reading the definition aloud.
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Fake AP Style
A Twitter jokester is compiling a fake AP Stylebook. Example entry: “Instead of prepositions, it’s preferable to end sentences with propositions, so why don’t we start a dry cleaning business?” (via)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Evison, Oates, Theroux, Fontane
New this week is Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story about the death of her husband (this was the source of her recent, quite moving essay in the New Yorker), and the expanded rerelease of Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Also new on shelves from NYRB Classics is Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, who discussed Fontane in our Year in Reading in December.
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Jericho Brown and the South
Award-winning poet Jericho Brown discusses how the ongoing push and pull of the South continue to fuel his powerful work.
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Seamus Heaney’s Final Verse
The Guardian has published what may be Seamus Heaney’s final poem. The poet passed away this year at the age of 74, and his work was eloquently remembered by Trent Morris on our site soon after.
Disrupting the Truth
Recommended Reading: How social media swallowed print newspapers — i.e., the future of the book.
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