“The worlds of poetry and law enforcement would seem to share little. But a few poet cops hope to change that perception, one line at a time.”
Poet Cops
2010: The Year of the Literary Dystopia?
Our own Emily Mandel may have been onto something with her “catastrophic” summer reading list; dystopia seems to be all the rage this summer. The WSJ sets Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death in “a dystopian United States that is halfway between Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Woody Allen’s Sleeper.” The SF Chron calls Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story “literature’s first dystopian epistolary romantic satire.” And later this year, as we noted this month, will be Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez, which focuses on a cultish community in the dystopian aftermath of a flu pandemic.
Kindred
The new novel by Colm Tóibín draws largely from the author’s memories of his father passing away when he was young. In a Guardian essay, the author writes about his discovery that literature can be a vessel for grief, with a nod to the writer and Dublin mainstay Mary Lavin. If you’d like to learn more about Tóibín’s fiction, you can read our pieces on his books.
The Diaries of Roland Barthes
At the Book Bench, slides of Roland Barthes’ diaries from 1977 in their original, hand-written form: “His brilliance, which indelibly influenced literary theory, semiotics, social theory, and post-structuralism, can make him seem as distant as he is renowned. Yet the diary entries… reveal Barthes to be extraordinarily sensitive and relatable.” (via The Rumpus)
Recommended Reading: New Ashbery
Recommended Reading: The American Reader has some new John Ashbery poems. We love “Listening Tour.”
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You’ve Been Sleeping on Romance Novels
“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Jamie Green writes for Buzzfeed about how romance novels have gotten more feminist over the years (and still getting a happily ever after) and people are now starting to sit up and take notice.
Area Woman Makes the Best of It
What do you do when McSweeney’s rejects your humor piece? You could, like most people, slink off and write something new, perhaps after a quick look at the site to get a better sense of what they’re looking for, or you could write a new humor piece about getting rejected by McSweeney’s. At The Nervous Breakdown, Rachel Pollan takes the latter route (with a cameo by the movie Swingers).
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Writing From Beyond the Grave
Do famous authors owe it to the reading public to publish their unfinished works after death? Casey N. Cep traces the contentious history of writers’ estates.