Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, recently profiled by Sam Sacks, has two short pieces up on the Bomb! website.
Two-fer from Kiš
The Marriage Plot, The Movie?
Superbad and Adventureland director Greg Mottola is reportedly eying Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot for a possible big screen adaptation.
Thoughts on a Prodigy
“The American poem was not in a grave at that time; not by any measure. There was achievement, experiment, excitement. But there was also confinement. It could be felt in the air, in an ethos of conditional acceptance. A young woman poet was not yet a familiar sight. When Auden remarked about [Adrienne] Rich’s poems, after choosing her as a Yale Younger Poet, that they were ‘neatly and modestly dressed,’ it sounded more like a counsel for the nursery than acclaim for a new writer.” At The New Republic, Eavan Boland reflects on the legacy of the poet, whose posthumous collection, Later Poems, came out last week.
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Septuagenarian Akutagawa Prize Winner
Paging Sonya Chung and the rest of the Bloom gang: one of this year’s Akutagawa Prize winners is a seventy-five year old woman named Natsuko Kuroda. How’s that for a Post-40 Bloomer? (h/t Dustin Kurtz)
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Kofi Awoonor Memorial Reading
Iowa City, which is one of six UNESCO Cities of Literature, will honor renowned Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor with a memorial reading this Monday, October 14. Awoonor was among those killed in the attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The reading, which will be hosted by Awoonor’s nephew, Kwame Dawes, will take place on the University of Iowa campus, but it will also be open to anybody with an internet connection. People are invited to tune in to the event’s streaming webcast, and also to submit questions for Dawes online to the @UIIWP Twitter account by utilizing the #Awoonor hashtag.
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Choose Your Own Adventure Real Talk
For the most part, the scariest thing you can do in a choose your own adventure book is choose to enter a cave. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg shows us what choose your own adventure would’ve looked like if it were historically accurate. “It is daytime. Turn to page 19. Page 19: You have died in childbirth.”
Page 19: You have died in childbirth
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
It is daytime. Turn to page 19.
Read more at http://the-toast.net/2014/04/23/choose-adventure-human-history/#crEV03DC0ezuzuuz.99
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The Desert Oracle Gives You the Desert
Pacific Standards profiles Ken Layne who quietly started the popular quarterly literary magazine, Desert Oracle for a town of 8,000 people. Now it has gained far more readers than that as it highlights works related to the American desert. “The reason that the Oracle works is that it’s always trying to elicit that feeling, the awe and wonder that the desert reveals to you when you listen hard enough. Layne believes it’s not an accident that religious awakenings, UFO sightings, walkabouts, and other revelations occur in the desert. It’s a consequence of solitude, stark beauty, and the tenacious life that only the desert has.”
How Should A Feminist Be?
“…its woman-centredness also hints at feminism’s dirty secret: that feminists might be feminists because they are supremely interested in themselves, even if that interest is in the shape of self-doubt. While Sheila says that it’s great to be a woman because what a female genius should be hasn’t yet been established, that is also the problem of being a woman.” The London Review of Books addresses the problems of Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?. For another perspective, don’t miss our interview with Heti.