Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
Listen Up!
Recommended Single Sentence Animation
You may have heard us mention Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading project recently. It’s a great new venture in which short stories are selected by other prominent writers — and it’s recently surpassed its fundraising goal. Now, they’ve even combined the project with one of their most beloved classics: Single Sentence Animation. Check out this little ditty to accompany Ben Marcus’s “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” and, of course, check out their Kickstarter page.
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Reflecting on Time During Quaratine Reading
Parul Sehgal examines time through the writing being produced during the pandemic, as well as the books she reads (and re-reads).
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BLM, the Novel
“Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do,” he said. “Keep your hands visible. Don’t make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you.” Read an excerpt from the Black Lives Matter–inspired YA novel The Hate U Give by A. C. Thomas, scheduled for release next June. See also some of our favorite writers on their favorite political writing, or our review of Nate Marshall’s poetry collection, Wild Hundreds, which critic Emmanuel N. Adolf Alzuphar called “the foremost articulation of contemporary blackness’s dynamism in literature.”
Welcome, Kate!
This week we are delighted to announce that Kate Gavino is joining The Millions as Social Media Editor! Kate is a writer, illustrator, and creator of the website Last Night’s Reading, which was compiled into a published collection by Penguin Books in 2015. Her second book, Sanpaku, was published by BOOM! Studies in August of 2018. She most recently worked as a social media editor at Brooklyn Public Library.
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Close Call
After losing funding last spring, the Orange Prize has experienced a rebirth, gaining new financial backers and changing names; it will now be known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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Bookends on Russian Literature
To accompany this infographic on Russian literature, The New York Times asked Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser what makes 19th century Russian writing so distinctive. Pair with our own Matt Seidel‘s take on rejected Bookends questions.
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