The evolution of the celebrity profile should be divided into two eras, one pre- and the other post-T.C.: Truman Capote.
Breakfast at History’s
The Quality of No Qualities
The new book Robert Musil and the NonModern offers David Winters a chance to revisit The Man Without Qualities. (While you’re at it, check out the essay on literary theory Winters wrote for us in September…and Matthew Gallaway‘s piece on Musil from January.)
Forgetting Poetry
We all probably had the humiliating experience of reciting a poem in high school. Yet at Salon, Nina Kang believes that memorizing poetry is a lost art. She blames the loss of the discipline on our tendency to skim and new poetry’s seeming aversion to memorization. “Writers actively fight against the appearance of artifice, and often instead strive for an informal, offhand tone, with that hint of clumsiness that lends a certain authenticity to the voice. It turns out this is a quality that makes the reciter’s job that much more difficulty.” Here’s our take on the lost art of recitation.
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
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U.S. History Textbooks or J.K. Rowling’s Magic
Over at Indian Country Today Media Network, read a statement in response to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America. “What matters here, folks, in this debate over J.K. Rowling’s latest work is the language society uses – the language that is still taught to kids in schools today about Native Americans and our spiritualities.”
Everybody Kafkas
It’s hard work writing Kafka stories appropriate for children, but a guy named Matthue Roth is willing to do it.
The Queens Bookshop Initiative
What can make the world a better place? Books. Check out this Kickstarter to bring a bookstore to Queens.