We’ve already published a pair of great lists of gifts for writers, but I know more than one book lover (ahem) who would be thrilled to get this collection of vintage Penguin book cover postcards.
Bookish Postcards from Penguin
“Sing About Me”
“Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts…When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.” Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
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Thees and Thous
Recommended reading: a new, previously undiscovered story and accompanying poem by Charlotte Brontë. The story is rife with flogging and embezzlement–all the good stuff! Here’s a bonus piece on how Charlotte is at least partly responsible for the success of the Bronte sisters as a whole.
From Football to Fiction
Rashard Mendenhall is retiring from the Arizona Cardinals in order to write, among other reasons. “The truth is, I don’t really think my walking away is that big of deal. For me it’s saying, ‘Football was pretty cool, but I don’t want to play anymore. I want to travel the world and write!'” Maybe he’ll be published by another retired sports star’s imprint?
Mutually Exclusive
Diehard fans of Herzog, Dangling Man and other great books by Saul Bellow will be interested to learn that the author, as revealed in a new memoir by his son, once asked himself the following question: “Was I a man or a jerk?”
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Identifying in the First Person
Jessica Love writes for The American Scholar about some recent psychological studies on the art and perspective of storytelling. Of particular interest is the way “the first person does seem to encourage us to identify with the narrator, especially when that narrator is a lot like us.” Not that identifying with narrators is the primary purpose of reading, as the New Yorker reminds us in a piece against “relatability,” but it’s something to consider the next time you pick up a novel and find a character who seems to be just like you.
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Working Against the Narrative
“If I was working against any existing Detroit narrative, it is the one where working-class black people exist as numbers or victims and not as fully-realized, complex people.” Angela Flournoy on her most recent work, The Turner House, a National Book Award finalist. We interviewed the author and reviewed the book.
It’s a handsome set. I’ve been burning through my hundred for about a year, I think, and there’s no shortage of pretty cards left.