It’s time for Columbia University Press’s annual Spring Sale!
50% off at CUP
They Really Get Me
For an invigorating jolt of proletarian/genetic bitterness, The New York Times has a "New Victorian" fashion slide show, featuring a selection of gentlemen with admirable bone structure, all in thousand-dollar cutaway coats and plaids and things.
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Notes from the Melbourne Writers Festival
“If DBC Pierre wasn’t twelve scotches into a bender before he went on stage, I have lost a substantial wager.” Notes from the Melbourne Writers Festival, at the Electric Literature blog.
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Gwendolyn Brooks’s Archives Headed to Urbana-Champaign
The literary archives of Gwendolyn Brooks – the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize – are headed to the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The haul amounts to more than “150 boxes stuffed with manuscripts, drafts, revisions, correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, homemade chapbooks in which Brooks neatly handwrote her earliest (unpublished) poems, and heavy bronze awards ensconced in velvet-lined boxes collected later in her career.”
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The New Yorker on The Late American Novel
The folks at The New Yorker's Book Bench offer their take at The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. (Spoiler Alert: Katherine Hepburn gets a shoutout.)
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“Lissa” by Michael Bourne
Tin House magazine has posted a short story, "Lissa," by our own Michael Bourne as part of its regular online Flash Fridays feature. Also be sure to catch his Year In Reading entry that posted earlier today.
Introducing/A New Feature
Good news, Twitter poets! The Goddess of 140 Characters decided to let us tweet line breaks. (h/t Slate)
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“Depressing day”
A while back, I linked to a contentious letter between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, written not long after Bellow found out Ludwig was sleeping with his wife. Now, here’s a (somewhat) less angry piece of correspondence, sent from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym. Sample quote: “Has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always unhappy?”
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