Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
Culture Club
Free That Verse
From the Beat poet to the particularly heroic couplet, here’s a handy illustration of poetic justice from Grant Snider over at The New York Times.
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Skip The Hangover III. Read A Book Instead.
Sean Manning boldly declares Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season — John Gregory Dunne’s first novel — to be “the best book about Sin City ever written.” And yes, he knows what you’re thinking. He really does think it’s better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“Research is about following the gleam into the dark.”
“Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.” The Rumpus interviews Lauren Groff, who’s a bit of a Millions favorite. Here’s her Millions interview and here’s Arcadia as Janet Potter’s Staff Pick this past April. Also, here’s a #LitBeat of a Literary Death Match she competed in earlier this year, in LA.
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Poet Claudia Rankine Narrates the S. Bronx
The L Magazine features an interview with poet/multi-genre artist Claudia Rankine, whose performance piece The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue — a Rankine-written-and-recorded narrative that accompanies a bus ride through the South Bronx — will run for two months beginning Labor Day Weekend.
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Together
Writing a novel together might seem like a recipe for conflict, but Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson, who co-wrote War of the Encyclopaedists together, argue the exercise ended up deepening their longtime friendship. At Salon, they explain why.
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The Signature Smirk of the Absurd
This essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Kurt Vonnegut‘s “strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality” is certainly worth a read.