Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, sits down with Paula M.L. Moya for a great interview focusing on race at The Boston Review.
“Is it possible to overcome the horrible legacy of slavery and find decolonial love?”
Literary Culture in Boston
Boston has announced the country's first "Literary Culture District," marked by memorials to Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath. It also includes some arguably less interesting sites - the buildings that used to house The Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown and Company, for example. Caroline O'Donovan writes critically about the new district for The Baffler and concludes that "we’ve allowed glib cultural ideals to occlude economic realities, and tourism tax dollars to triumph over a candid conversation about the origins of art and the sustainability of its production."
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“Will you sign my house?”
“Is this skyscraper autobiographical?” People say some pretty ridiculous things about writing. To put it in perspective, Mallory Ortberg presents "If We Talked About Architecture Like We Talk About Writing."
“Strings unleashing”
“I have tried them all,
The cotton, the nylon,
absorbing water, rolling in sand,
sticky flakes of broken glass.
We all drown in the end.”
Anne Sexton’s summer bikini tips.
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Some Good Stuff
Two great scoops were passed my way by the intrepid Brian, fresh from his European sojourn. The first is this so-wierd-it-has-to-be-true story about Newt Gingrich being an extremely prolific and friendly Amazon.com customer reviewer. Click here for the must-read gory details.While in Spain, Brian read Robert Hughes' new book Barcelona: The Great Enchantress from the National Geographic Directions series and noticed on the back cover that Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker's Baghdad correspondent extraordinaire, has a book for the series coming out. It will be about Andalucia. This will be a busy year for Anderson. In the fall, his fantastic Baghdad pieces will be collected in The Fall Of Baghdad and he will also release Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, which ought to be quite good.
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W Memoir on the Way
The Decider will be offering his version of the Presidential memoir with Decision Points (sounds like a thriller, no?) due on November 9. (One week after mid-term elections)
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The Rumpus Redesign
Everyone's favorite scrappy San Fransisco literary web site, The Rumpus, has relaunched with a major redesign. Go over and poke around why don't you? If you're looking for a place to start, why not Roxane Gay's recent essay on the New York Times Book Review section's dismal numbers when it comes to reviewing books written by people of color?
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