Something you should hear: Open City author and prolific tweeter Teju Cole on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show.
Teju Cole on the Leonard Lopate Show
English-ish
Recommended Viewing: this video that shows you how different languages sound to foreigners who don’t understand a word. (And yes, it includes both American and British English.) (h/t Language Lab)
Tuesday New Release Day: Harbach, Hitchens, Tuck, Farah, Solomon, Barry, Krauss
A big haul of new books this week. At the top of the list is Chad Harbach's much anticipated debut, The Art of Fielding. Also new this week: the new Christopher Hitchens collection Arguably, Lily Tuck's I Married You for Happiness, Nuruddin Farah's Crossbones, and Anna Solomon's debut The Little Bride. Sebastian Barry's Booker long-listed On Canaan's Side is now available in the U.S. And Great House by Nicole Krauss is now out in paperback.
Digital Love
Jonathan Franzen's 2011 Kenyon commencement speech, published this weekend in the New York Times, covers love, consumerism, and narcissism in the digital age. If you're concerned with critical reception, looks like you're not a creator of "serious art and literature," in Franzen's eyes.
The Escape of North Korea’s Poet Laureate
For years, Jang Jin Sung traveled within Kim Jong-il’s inner circle. As North Korea’s official poet laureate, he was tasked with “writing epic poems for [the] dictator … and overseeing inter-Korean espionage.” But in 2004, fearing a charge of treason, Sung fled the country, becoming one of the nation’s most high-profile defectors. Recently, Sung – who just published his memoir – spoke with Maclean's about his life, his escape, and literature.
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“We are pouring a lot of money down the drain”
A lucid piece in The Boston Globe explains how "academic publishing is not a free market."
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“But poetry means making”
“We all use a ‘persona’ or mask, to some degree, all the time,” writes poet Robert Pinsky as he challenges the notion—widely held in English classes throughout the world—that a poem’s “speaker” is necessarily separate from a poem’s author. The latest release from Pinsky, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, is Selected Poems, and you can hear him read some excerpts in this video.