Recommended Reading: Diode Poetry Journal 6.1.
Read Your Diode
“Life was not cake.”
Melville House has one of the short stories from Tao Lin’s Bed up for your noontime reading pleasure.
Roberto Bolaño in the NYRB Blog
“The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup.” The New York Review of Books Blog posts an essay by — you guessed it — Roberto Bolaño.
●
●
Timely Books?
“In publishing, we see this play out in a number of ways. Marginalized writers are told by white editors, we need your stories now more than ever, as if we have not always needed them urgently. We are told our experiences are timely, exotic, and trendy. We are told our stories are not authentic if our characters do not suffer, as if the only way to prove that we are human is to bleed.” Natalia Sylvester on the erasure that comes when marginalized writers are constantly being told by the publishing industry and others that your book about your marginalized identity is ‘timely’.
Indie Road Trip
Something to do with those last remaining days of vacation: go on a national indie bookstore tour, as designed by Chin Music Press.
●
●
Yang Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature
On Monday, Gene Luen Yang became the first graphic novelist to be named a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. We have interviewed Yang and reviewed The Shadow Hero.
Whither the last typewriter?
Historian Suzanne Fischer on nostalgic artifacts and the changing use for typewriters from work objects to elements of decor.