Let’s take a moment to be jealous of other countries, shall we? In Iceland, “one in ten [residents] will publish something in their lifetime.” Norway’s government “buys 1,000 copies of every book a Norwegian author publishes. It provides a $19,000 annual subsidy to every author.” In Argentina, “the city of Buenos Aires now gives pensions to published writers.”
Three Reasons To Move Abroad
The Good Fight
Sometimes — like now, say — an artist has to ask what it means to continue working. At The Rumpus, Lara Downes explores her resolve to keep playing and teaching music, and writes about what she’s done while teaching in Louisville this week.
Pilgrim at Tinker.com
A brand new lit mag out of Canada, Numero Cinq, goes by the tagline “a warm place on a cruel web.” As if to drive home the point, the editors published a nifty study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Refuge in Reading
It’s World Refugee Day and Book Riot has 100 (yes, 100!) reading recommendations. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Ted Gioia proposed, Kanye-style, that Vladimir Nabokov‘s Pnin was actually the greatest refugee novel of all time.
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Oh, you were the best of all my days.
Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s “Animals,” by way of the Chicago based ad and design agency, Coudal Partners, and their voice mail based poetry project, Verse by Voice.
Cult Classic
Frank Stanford isn’t the most well-known American poet, but he is one of the most revered, at least according to his contemporaries. At The Rumpus, David Biespeil writes about a new collection of the poet’s work, remarking that “no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.”
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