Three cheers for literary magazines, eh? Do yourself a favor and check out Tin House’s new Portland/Brooklyn issue (with mixtape to match!), DIAGRAM 12.4, Hobart’s revamped website (with daily content!), and the brand new Revolver magazine out in the Twin Cities.
Lit Mags, Ahoy!
Retreat with Eliot
Looking for a New England writer's retreat? Perhaps you could stay in T. S. Eliot's childhood summer home.
Soccer: The Sublime & the Nonsensical
Recommended Reading: Michael J. Avogino's "Total Utter Madness: A Story of Soccer" from the Tin House archives. If you're going to watch soccer all day, might as well throw some good writing in there too, right? An example: "Life would go on, as would the sport of soccer and all that came with it: the brotherhood, the ethnocentricity, the sportsmanship, the nationalism, the love, the regionalism, the racism, class conflict, the sublime, the nonsensical, amongst white, black, brown, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jew, everyone guilty and innocent."
Oh Say Can You Sing
A high school music teacher is trying his damnedest to establish an official state song for New Jersey, which is apparently the only state in America without its own anthem. If you’re curious, here’s a list of the 49 other states and their official, state-sanctioned musical accompaniments.
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Behind the Red Pen
Last week, our own Edan Lepucki interviewed her copyeditor. This week at Tin House, executive editor Michelle Wildgen reflects on what she has learned from being both an editor and writer. Her biggest discovery: "The whole thing should be a conversation."
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In Case You Didn’t Know
In The Globe and Mail, Nick Mount reviews How to Read Literature, a new book by Terry Eagleton that you can file next to Reading Like a Writer and How Fiction Works.
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Libraries: Future and Present
"Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information. Asking about the future of libraries is another way of asking where this big, hot mess of information is taking us." Justin Wadland reviews three books on libraries and attempts to predict the future of these institutions in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University has just opened and its library has no books at all.
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