Litquake, the West Coast’s largest literary festival, now offers downloadable bi-monthly podcasts via their website and iTunes. On the site presently are episodes with Geoff Dyer, Carolyn Burke, Adam Johnson, Joshua Cohen, and Molly Ringwald, and the group plans to livestream and post events from their upcoming festival (Oct. 5-13) as well.
Litquake’s Lit Cast
Telegram for You, Sir
Daniel Woodrell was so busy dodging bill collectors that he almost missed a telegram from an agent interested in his first novel, Under the Bright Lights. He discusses his writing career, the film adaptation of Winter’s Bone, and how he’s used the same coffee mug since 1974 for The Daily Beast’s “How I Write” series.
Quick Links
A teacher’s charming poem in which he winds the imaginative grammar and spelling of his students into a feast of clever words. (via)A cornucopia of palindromes. “Rot can rob a born actor” and many, many more. And don’t miss the Palindrome Drama at the end of the page.Stephen Schenkenberg looks at how people find his blog… “how+do+you+construct+buried+alive+escape+tunnel” ???The 13-number ISBN is the book industry’s Y2K. For more details, see my post from 2004.Ed plumbs bad Amazon reviews, a never-ending ending font of humor.
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Animals!
Today in things you might like to read about animals: Some birds, apparently, not only mourn their dead but even hold funeral services. And while it’s widely known that the internet is made of cats, Wired dug a little deeper and tried to uncover the root of our collective feline fixation.
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Tune in next week
Emily Nussbaum on the poetry of cliffhangers, “which makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience—like a bridge made out of lightning. Primal and unashamedly manipulative, cliffhangers are the signature gambit of serial storytelling.”
Citizen of the Year Reading List
ICYMI Colin Kaepernick was named GQ‘s 2017 Citizen of the Year a few weeks ago. In light of this honor two of his closest friends “have compiled a list of ‘Freedom Dream’ resources spanning close to two centuries—including books, essays, films, documentaries, songs, and museums—that can help readers, viewers, and listeners to understand race as the central political, cultural, economic, social, and geographic organizing principle of our nation, past and present. For it is only when we acknowledge the centrality of race in dictating the outcomes of life and death in the United States can we begin to work toward meaningful forms of racial justice.” Find the books, music and movies that helped inspire Kaepernick (and that will enlighten you too) here.