Nineteen intrepid RapGenius users set out to break down the “cultural clusterf*ck and middle finger to the stripped-down simplicity of the Imagists” otherwise known as T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.”
RapGenius Breaks Down “The Wasteland”
Appearing Elsewhere
Ever wonder what writing contests do with the money they earn from entrance fees? Poets & Writers has posted detailed 2011 budgets from three of the country’s most prestigious book prizes, collected as part of my piece in the May/June issue of the magazine on the economics of writing contests.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Cronin, Danielewski, Aira, Jacobson, Bowden
Among this week’s new books we have The Twelve by Justin Cronin (our review), The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski (our interview), The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira (our review), and Zoo Time by past Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson. In non-fiction, Mark Bowden has penned an account of the killing of bin Laden.
An Intrepid Voyage
Emma Watson’s book club will now be reading Year in Reading alumna Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which “rewards us with an expansive way of considering identity, caretaking, and freedom.”
Bookstores: Aquatic and Secret
In Karen Russell‘s Swamplandia!, there is an enchanting place known as the abandoned Library Boat. “It held a cargo of books,” Ava Bigtree explains, “In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged, undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors.” Now something similar has moored in England’s canals. And, across the Atlantic, one New Yorker is keeping his own open secret.
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The Best New Underground Literary Magazines
From The Independent, the best of the new breed of underground literary magazines to fit into that “empty slot on the bookshelf between your pristine copies of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Granta.”
Jacobs’s Centennial
Yesterday, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would have turned 100. Some used the anniversary to commemorate her life and others argued that we need to stop deifying her.
Zombie Franchises
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