The PEN Blog has a present for everybody: four poems by Charles Simic.
Sunday Simic
Cool Story, Bro
The word “cool” has been cool for more than 70 years. At Slate, Carl Wilson examines why this slang stuck, and how it’s evolved from being used by beatniks to smartphone companies. “Cool is an attitude that allows detached assessment, but one that prizes an air of knowingness over specific knowledge. I think that’s why it doesn’t become dated, unlike hotter-running expressions of enthusiasm like groovy or rad.” Pair with: Michael Agger’s essay on why we love the “cool story, bro” meme.
Not Just the Mind’s Eye
A new Tumblr, The Composites, takes descriptions of characters from novels and feeds them through police composite sketch software to produce images of their “faces.” Creepy and cool. (via kottke)
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A New Native American Epic
There There by Tommy Orange is one of our most anticipated books of the year. It debuts next week and this week Orange receives the New York Times treatment along with a few other rising star indigenous writers in an excellent profile. “Mr. Orange is part of a new generation of acclaimed indigenous writers from the United States and Canada who are publishing groundbreaking, formally innovative poetry, fiction and prose, shattering old tropes and stereotypes about Native American literature, experience and identity. Their ranks include poets like Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, Joshua Whitehead and Tommy Pico, and the essayists and memoirists Elissa Washuta and Terese Marie Mailhot.
2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominees Announced
The nominees for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner fiction award have been announced. The books in the running are Millions Hall of Famer A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Egan profiled at The Millions); The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions); National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon; Model Home by Eric Puchner (one of our “20 More Under 40“); and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson (Brad Watson’s Year in Reading 2009).
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Welcome Dixon Bean Brown!
The Millions family keeps getting bigger! A big welcome to our newest Millions reader: Dixon Bean Brown born June 22nd to our long-time staff writers Edan Lepucki and Patrick Brown.
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The Empathy Exams
“[G]uess what, spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place.” Alex Balk at The Awl takes the piss out of recent studies that have suggested reading literary fiction might make us better people. Writer John Vaillant, whom we interviewed last year, might disagree.
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