Writing for Ploughshares, Sean Bishop ranks ten poetry presses by the quality of their cover designs.
Take THAT, eBooks!
Auditors Welcome
Historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain have done us all a serious solid by assembling a syllabus of readings around “what many simply call ‘Trumpism’: personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation.” The self-directed course contains readings from more than 100 scholars – including Audre Lorde, Aziz Ansari, and Ta-Nehisi Coates – and aims to “introduce observers to the past and present conditions that allowed Trump to seize electoral control of a major American political party.”
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Art Dealer$
Fresh on the heels of Rachel Cohen’s Believer piece on “the unexpected double history of banking and the art world,” one of the country’s biggest art collectors is slammed with a $276 million insider trading accusation.
Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
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Time Traveling in Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’
Octavia E. Butler's Kindred remains a touchstone of speculative fiction for its innovative use of time travel to reckon with slavery in the antebellum South.
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In Praise of the Booker
In light of Howard Jacobson’s victory for The Finkler Question, Laura Miller at Salon explains why the Man Booker Prize is the best of the literary awards.
Lolita, in the Margins
When Vladimir Nabokov developed a screen adaptation for Lolita, his director Stanley Kubrick declared it the “best ever written in Hollywood”–meaning, it seems, most gorgeously novelistic, evocative, readable. Here’s a short excerpt of his screenplay with original margin notes.