For anyone searching for some weighty longreads about the current state of poetry, look no further than the lively (and longwinded) debate between Matvei Yankelevich and Marjorie Perloff sparked by the latter’s piece, “Poetry on the Brink.”
Poetic Pugilists
Prison Prose
What inspired Wally Lamb’s latest novel, We Are Water? Part of it came from his experience teaching writing at a women’s prison in Connecticut for the past 14 years. He spoke to The Missouri Review about what it’s like to teach “the incarcerated wounded” and how they have influenced his work. “With my fiction, I’ve never been afraid to go to the dark places, but I think the women have made me more daring.”
The Pioneer Detectives on Kobo
Prefer to read your ebooks on a Kobo reader? Good news: the latest ebook original from The Millions, The Pioneer Detectives, is now available on Kobo.
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Our Massive, Shared, Ubiquitous Digital Brain
Michael Seidlinger writes on how consciousness occurs online. As he puts it, “We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our rocks up a hill littered with hyperlinks and tweets, perpetually, futilely, refreshing the page of existence.” Pair with this Millions piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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More Moss
The new issue of Moss Magazine, “a journal of the Pacific Northwest,” is up, including an interview with Amanda Coplin, author of The Orchardist. (The previous issue featured fiction by our own Sonya Chung.)
A Cemetery Wording Expedition with Alex Thurman
During the pandemic, librarian Alex Thurman discovered Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery and its fascinating grave marker inscriptions that happened to be common English words.
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Sentimental Education
Recommended Reading: On sentimentality in literary fiction and commercial novels.
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