Speaking of podcasts: our own Epic Fail hits the Culture File podcast. Listen up!
Epic Listening
War Stories
Over at The Rumpus, Caleb Cage interviewed Year in Reading alumnus Phil Klay about wars and human nature.
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And on and on and on.
Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (a book length study of Celine Dion's megablockbusting album of the same name), revisits the enduring and sort of nauseating classic from Titanic's soundtrack in The Atlantic.
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Clever Girl(s)
If you’re struggling to find a book deal, you might want to skip this story because it’ll be so demoralizing: a group of women are making a ton of money by publishing “dinosaur erotica” with titles such as Taken by the T-Rex, Ravished by the Triceratops, and Taken by the Pterodactyl. (Pretty lame, if you ask me, that that last title isn't spelled “Ptaken…”)
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Allen Ginsberg, Beat Historian
"It’s not often one gets the opportunity to take a course on a major literary movement taught by a founding member of that movement," but Allen Ginsberg's lectures on "the literary history of the Beats" are now available online via Open Culture.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Alexievich; Hall; Phillips; Melamed; Scott
Out this week: The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich; Madame Zero by Sarah Hall; Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips; Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed; and Careers for Women by Joanna Scott. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Lemony Snicket’s Poetry Selections
Lemony Snicket curated a “children’s poetry portfolio” for Poetry, however the poems contained therein “are not made for children.” Take a look for yourself. There are selections from Maram al-Massri, Carl Sandburg, Katerina Rudcenkova, Ron Padgett, and more.
Beginner’s Luck
“Our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix,” the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris. On how Voltaire outsmarted one of the earliest lotteries and made a fortune. Also check out how Goethe became an amateur auction theorist.
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