Planning to strut your stuff while reading on the beach? Don’t forget to match your book.
“bikinis meet their match”
On American Letters
“If I have a critique of American letters, it’s that the average American doesn’t read broadly enough, not enough work in translation, that we’re too isolated, too narrow in our reading habits, still too locked into boxes like the one built out of white male heteronormativity.” M. Bartley Seigel, outgoing co-editor of PANK Magazine, on his impressions of American literature. Pair with our piece on the submission processes at literary magazines.
Watching Olive Kitteridge
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed readers to the trailer for Olive Kitteridge, the new HBO show based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Year in Reading alum Elizabeth Strout. In this week’s New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum sizes up the new series, describing it as a case study in bringing a work of fiction to the screen. “In the course of four hours, the miniseries casts a West Coast spell on scenes of Yankee repression,” she writes.
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The Destruction of a Ruin
Recommended Reading: Teju Cole meditates on the destruction of the Baalshamin temple in Palmyra, Syria at The New Inquiry. “The destruction of a ruin is like the desecration of a body. It is a vengeance wreaked on the past in order to embitter the future.“
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A Poem From Us
"A Poem From Us" features regular people reading their favorite poems. According to the project's founder, Felix Jung, its goal is to "use technology to help folks share their love of poetry with others." That's something we can all get behind, isn't it? You can participate in two ways: record a video of yourself recording your favorite poem, or request a set of free promotional stickers for the project.
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A National Mission
The new poet laureate of Canada wants to clue his readers in to the prevalence of poetry in their everyday lives. “People often don’t realize they’re surrounded by poetry,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “At the very least, it’s in the songs they listen to.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Grey, Clowes, Enright, Shin
The much discussed Fifty Shades of Grey arrives as a paperback today, though one wonders if readers will be as willing to read it if they must shed the privacy of the e-reader. Also out is the gorgeous retrospective, The Art of Daniel Clowes. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and MAN Asian Literary Prize winner Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin are new in paperback.