With the erosion of the 175-year-old Times-Picayune, New Orleans will soon be one of the largest metro areas without its own major newspaper publishing every day. Over at The Atlantic, Emily Badger explains the sad saga of its demise as well as the complexities and uncertainties yet to come.
The Paper New Orleans Needs
Goodreads Recommendations
Goodreads has unveiled its new book recommendation feature. Unlike Amazon's feature, Goodreads' will draw data from every book you've read and logged, not just those you've purchased online.
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PEN/Faulkner Fiction Finalists Announced
Five finalists have been named for this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles, Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, (Year in Reading alum) Joan Silber’s Fools, and Valerie Trueblood’s Search Party: Stories of Rescue. One winner will be selected on April 2, 2014, and a celebratory dinner will be held in its honor on May 10. You can read up on all of the finalists over here.
Poetry and Ouija
On life, love, poetry and Ouija: the New Yorker profiles the life and work of James Merrill.
“Republics of Imagination”
Our love of The Atlantic's By Heart series continues with Azar Nafisi's contribution to the series: an essay on reading James Baldwin, the importance of literature to democracy, and how ultimately "we need literature to remind us how like each other we are, despite our differences." Pair with Justin Campbell's Millions essay on race, fatherhood and reading Baldwin.
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A Radical Vision
Recommended reading: this brilliant and thorough profile of Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, complete with a video of Morrison reading from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child.
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When We Were Young
Over at the Catapult, Nicole Chung has launched a series on adoption, featuring essays by Megan Galbraith and James Han Mattson. You could also check out Matthew Salesses’s Millions essay on inciting incidents and new beginnings as an adoptee.