Today is St. Crispin’s Day, a day immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V when the title character rallied his British “band of brothers” to face their French adversaries. And according to Guy Patrick Cunningham, “there are lots of ways we can celebrate it.”
St. Crispin’s Day is Here Again
Read/Write NY
Today, stuff yourself on envy and/or nostalgia for the NYC literary life. First, whet your appetite on the New Yorker’s gorgeous illustrations of notable bookstores, including one “the size of a luxurious Park Avenue closet.” Continue to a responsible main course essay on Choire Sicha, The Awl, and the Brooklyn loft building where it was founded and resides: a place that is “pleasant” but “a little dumpy, too, because that’s sort of our MO.” For dessert, savor Erin Loeb’s personal essay on leaving New York, and finish with a fittingly varied cheese course of other writers also saying goodbye.
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Reviewer and Novelist Debate!
“Perhaps I can’t fully feel empathy and emotion for characters when I feel nothing but disdain for them.” Pank Magazine’s Kirsty Logan (who wrote today’s piece on the joys of unread books) debates with James Kaelan about We’re Getting On.
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Ted Hughes’ Lost Poem
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Transgender
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I Love Candy
“I wanted to tell him: Shut up! You’re ruining my high. People fall in love every single day.” A delightful little Dentist Poem by Daisy Friedman from the archives of The Paris Review.
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Is it just a Russian thing?
Jennie Erdal asks, “What is the modern equivalent of the philosophical novel?”
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A Year in Reading from The New Yorker
New Yorker contributors – including a couple of participants in our “Year in Reading” series – offer a predictably thoughtful and heterodox guide to the best books they read this year.
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Personal Space
Sometimes, in a narrative, it’s necessary to focus on one scene, in one place, for as long as one possibly can. In his new graphic novel, Here, Richard McGuire takes this to an extreme, setting the entirety of the story in one corner of a character’s living room. In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews the new book.
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