Lorrie Moore is headed to Nashville, Tennessee as Vanderbilt University’s new Gertrude Conaway Professor of English. That sound you just heard is the excited shriek of every Commodore English major yelling out in ecstasy.
Lorrie Commodore
Mount Airy, North Carolina
Carve out some time today, and let Evan Smith Rakoff show you how a wonderful essay about Andy Griffith can also be about Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, John Keats, ambition, nostalgia, the Hollywood blacklist, class, and grief.
Bohane Wins the IMPAC
Kevin Barry has won the lucrative €100,000 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first novel City of Bohane, capably reviewed in these pages over a year ago by Bill Morris (whose drawing of Barry illustrates the piece). You can also relive this year’s massive longlist and quirky shortlist.
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Whither the Bookshops?
The 1.5 million people who live in the Bronx lack a general interest bookstore, classifying their borough as one of a growing number of “book deserts” across the country. To combat this trend, the National Book Foundation just launched “The Book Rich Environment Initiative.” Meanwhile, Juma’a Ali runs a popular bookshop in a UN-administered refugee camp near the South Sudanese city of Malakal.
“Sing for our time, too.”
Photographer Stefano De Luigi, featured in the latest New Yorker, traces the route and oral tradition of Homer’s The Odyssey using only an iPhone.
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Literary Bald Britney Spears
Following Sarah Hepola’s devastating New York Times Magazine profile of Cat Marnell with empathy and queer theory, Jane Hu’s piece on what it means to read Marnell, to follow her and crave her work even as her work destroys her, merits reading and rereading.
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On The Emotional Dishonesty of Having a Thick Skin
At The Nervous Breakdown, Ronlyn Domingue’s honest and thoughtful “My Horrible New York Times Review” is a must-read for any writer who’s been rejected or ridiculed lately (and, really, who hasn’t been?)