The most important news of 2013 so far: Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler is currently writing a memoir, to be published in fall of 2014.
Vote Knope
Garrets Etc.
Most writers, unless they’re lucky enough to have an ideal place in which to work, make do with the best space available. For Colum McCann’s father, the shed in his backyard, which “always smelled damp inside, as if the rain rose up out of the carpet,” sufficed for the fiction he wrote after coming home from work. At Page-Turner, the National Book Award winner and Year in Reading alum remembers his father’s retreat.
A Shared Vernacular
Year in Reading alum David L. Ulin writes about how books forged a bond between him and his father. “Books are, have always been, a shared vernacular between us.”
This Charming Man
His music isn’t letting him get what he wants, so Morrissey is turning to writing instead. After his autobiography, Morrissey, was more successful than any of his records, the musician is writing a novel next.
Earth’s Song
Recommended Reading: Joseph Fasano’s “Coda,” which is The Missouri Review’s poem of the week. “Now he is listening for beginning./Now he is lying/among that sinew,/asking, as a boy would, where his song goes.”
Tuesday New Release Day
The latest effort from superstar translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is now on shelves. P & V’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is in our Hall of Fame, and we interviewed the couple last year. Also out: Mark Twain’s long-embargoed Autobiography is now shipping; V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa; X’ed Out by graphic novel master Charles Burns; Avi Steinburg’s literary memoir Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian; and the odd literary project that is James Franco has a new collection out, Palo Alto