“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 The envelope included a draft of ‘marcia,’ an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951.”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
Masters Review: Fall Fiction Contest
The Masters Review has announced Ann and Jeff VanderMeer as the judges for this year’s Fall Fiction Contest. The winning story will receive a $2,000 cash prize as well as publication in the magazine. Go submit, then read Josh Rolnick’s essay for The Millions on ten things he's learned in over a decade of sending out stories.
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Proof that Obama is a Socialist
At long last...Google provides proof that Obama is a socialist! "Barrack" Obama, that is.
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Finnegans What, Now?
I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex "fractal" sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to "ideal" mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.
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Jack Kerouac’s Journals
It's hard to resist reading others' diary entries, especially when the diaries in question belong to famous writers. Now that a selection of Jack Kerouac's journals is being released from The New Yorker archives and made available online, resistance is more or less futile. Originally published in 1998, these journal entries span the years from 1948 to 1950, from just after the long drive that inspired On the Road to the publication of Kerouac's first book, The Town and the City.
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How Many Loans Did This Take?
Meet Michael Nicholson, the 71-year-old Michigan man who’s earned 29 college degrees. I guess somebody hasn’t read the latest issue of n+1.
A Zombie Meets a Snake
Recommended Reading: Over at Harper’s, Anne Carson describes what happens when a zombie meets a snake, in her first published short story.
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