Let’s Find a Way to Make this Debate Happen

Like bestseller lists? The Book Standard’s giving them away for free for the next two weeks.Alibris is bought by a private equity firm. PW article suggests Abebooks could be next. (via BookFinder blog)Small publishers book big rewards (via Mumpsimus), but…Bookshops fall prey to online sales.

Listen to Seamus Heaney read his translation of Beowulf on the BBC’s website. For what it’s worth, Heaney’s version gets my vote as the best one out there. Consider this passage for some Wednesday inspiration.

Via Galleycat we’re watching the just-released trailer for the upcoming documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, which is scheduled to air on October 14th on PBS. Pair with this beautiful in memoriam we published upon her passing in 2014.

Now that NPR has begun fact checking his work, it’s come to light that David Sedaris is a liar. Or, he sort of embellishes. His work is ‘realish.’ So basically, he tells stories. On NPR.  Which is feeling pretty sensitive abut the line between truth and truthiness after the Mike Daisey upset.

Our intrepid AWP #LitBeat correspondent attended an offsite event called “Books Have Ruined Our Lives, Now We Want to Ruin Yours“

“It’s easy to attribute genius to a dead man, a legendary philanderer, liar and self-mythologizer who died beautiful and curly-haired. But ‘What About This’ is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.” On Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems.

George Saunders stopped by the Dinner Party podcast to dole out advice on topics ranging from constructing poems about wolves “making love,” dealing with a friend who’s been fired, sober-drunk relations, and “man purses.”