The Indiana Review is adding archived story excerpts and poems to its website. Here’s a Peter Jay Shippy poem they recommend.
The Indiana Review is Digitizing
Shifting from Criticism to Fiction with Lauren Oyler
Lauren Oyler discusses how writing literary criticism helped her define the intentional, dynamic style she wanted in her own fiction.
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Boyhood Tales
Random House is releasing a collection of previously unpublished poems and stories from Truman Capote’s youth, recently found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Over at Full Stop, Jacob Kiernan examines the keen political conscience in Capote’s never-before-published work. As he explains it, “While his early stories are structurally simple, they evince a prescient social conscience.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rakow; Hauser; Le Guin
Out this week: This Is Why I Came by Mary Rakow; The Baker’s Tale by Thomas Hauser; and Late In the Day, a new collection of poems by Ursula K. LeGuin. For more on these and other recent titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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The Blog Post That Has No Name
“She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent.” Betty Friedan’s second wave classic The Feminine Mystique turns fifty.
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Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition — as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex — in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was “more than one person.”
Chandra on Hemingway
It’s no secret we enjoy and highly recommend The Atlantic‘s By Heart series, and Vikram Chandra‘s essay on reading Hemingway is no exception. Pair with Jonathan Goldman‘s review of a modern edition of The Sun Also Rises.
The Author Would Like to Say Something
Now that Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award, it’s worth looking back on her interviews from recent years. You can read her piece in the Art of Fiction series, published in 2010 in The Paris Review; you could try her interview with the Times from back in October; or else you could take a look at her sit-down with The New Yorker in April. (This probably goes without saying, but you could also just read her new novel.)
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When Good Doesn’t Win the Day
Recommended Listening: On NPR’s All Things Considered, Petra Mayer offers advice to “literature’s unpunished villains.”
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