“Three weeks before she died on July 25, 2012, Marcia (Marty) Brown Stern ’54 sent me a registered letter, which began, ‘What is enclosed may astonish you.’ Indeed it did. The envelope included a draft of ‘marcia,’ an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951.”
Best Friends
A Drive in the Woods
Before he graduated college in 2005, Ken Ilgunas began to worry about his mounting college debt. As a novel way of dealing with it, he moved into a van, a decision he chronicles in a new, extremely well-titled book, Walden on Wheels.
Tragicomic
Recommended Reading: Helen Vendler on John Berryman. You could also read Stephen Akey on Berryman’s collection The Dream Songs.
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A Journal for the People
Recommended Reading: Zinzi Clemmons, one of the founders of Apogee Journal, on the importance of editors of color and inclusive literary journals.
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It’s Tuesday! It’s New Releases
The long, long awaited posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting… has arrived. Also newly out today (in the States) is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms.
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Appearing Elsewhere
My “10 Best Songs Based on Books” list, from yesterday’s Observer (UK), is up on the Guardian’s website. Obviously it’s not so much the 10 Best as the 10 Best I could think of while writing the list, but that kind of equivocation makes for terribly unsnappy titles.
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