Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
Listen Up!
On Adaptation
Recommended Reading: Alice Walker and Colm Tóibín discuss adaptations of their work for film and stage. Pair with our article on breaking down the Oscar for adapted screenplay.
The Guardian’s Books of the Year
The Guardian‘s Books of the Year feature should get you warmed up for our forthcoming Year In Reading series. We’ve wrangled together some great names this year. You can whet your appetite with our 2010 installment.
Type Writer Fetish
Want to make your writing more dramatic? Try using a typewriter. Tom Hanks professes his love for typewriters in The New York Times. “Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece,” he writes. Pair with: A St. Louis man placed typewriters around the city in hopes that residents will share their stories.
The People Hath Spoken
Is it possible to figure out Shakespeare’s politics from his plays? At the very least, there’s a lot we can learn.
Breaking Out
As part of a collaboration with several international magazines, Full-Stop is publishing Babelsprech International, a series of articles on poetry around the world. In the latest edition, Karel Piorecký writes about contemporary Czech poetry, drawing a line between the pre- and post-Communist periods. Related: John Yargo on the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.
No Fake Readers
“An appreciation of readers as diverse individuals with different tastes should be a basic tenet of criticism. Instead, it’s common for critics to imagine that their aesthetic preferences are the reflections of “readers” or a special class of readers—“serious readers,” “imaginative readers,” “brave readers,” or some other ill-defined category—whose views truly matter.” Lincoln Michel explains why “there’s no such thing as a fake reader” in an essay for Electric Literature.
This Week in Literary Journals
The latest issues of Barrelhouse and Big Bridge are online, free, and ready for your perusal.
Wild Inspiration
Here’s a potential remedy for your writer’s block or attention deficit issues: take a hike in the woods. (Maybe even take a hike while reading a book.)