Matt Seidel has a helpful guide for book clubs across the country: How To Tell If Someone In Your Book Club Is a Homicidal Maniac. One possible clue? He contributes to the Water for Elephants discussion by “telling anecdotes about torturing animals as a child.”
So I’m Reading with an Axe Murderer
Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition -- as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex -- in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was "more than one person.”
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Quick Links
A teacher's charming poem in which he winds the imaginative grammar and spelling of his students into a feast of clever words. (via)A cornucopia of palindromes. "Rot can rob a born actor" and many, many more. And don't miss the Palindrome Drama at the end of the page.Stephen Schenkenberg looks at how people find his blog... "how+do+you+construct+buried+alive+escape+tunnel" ???The 13-number ISBN is the book industry's Y2K. For more details, see my post from 2004.Ed plumbs bad Amazon reviews, a never-ending ending font of humor.
Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front
For a female war photographer and novelist who’s dealt with pink covers on her books, male colleagues who dismiss the Orange Prize and a publisher who titles her book Shutterbabe, it’s pretty rich to hear that our world is apparently “post-feminist.”
Translation Troubles
At Words Without Borders, Scott Esposito examines the thorny issues of reviewing books in translation, when it may not be clear exactly who to blame or praise, the author or the translator.
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Asymptote’s Third Birthday
Celebrate literary journal Asymptote's third anniversary in New York City later this month. The event will feature Eliot Weinberger, Jeffrey Yang (translator of Liu Xiaobo), Paris Review poetry editor Robyn Creswell, Idra Novey (translator of Clarice Lispector), and Daniella Gitlin (translator of Rodolfo Walsh). They will come together for a panel discussion on translation and readings. The event starts at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, January 21 at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe.
How to read the New Yorker this summer
Starting today and lasting until the end of the summer, The New Yorker is completely free online, including archives back to 2007. What to read? To start off, try searching the fiction page for, say, George Saunders. There's that famous Lawrence Wright piece on Scientology. Or feel free to consult the magazine's own roundup. But I happen to be most impressed by this grandaddy of all longform articles on six survivors of Hiroshima (subscription required).
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Opinions… In Verse
From now until August 16th, the editors of the Los Angeles Times’s Opinion section will accept poetry submissions. Their favorites will be published in the August 25th edition of the paper.
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