Celebrate the start of baseball season and the beginning of National Poetry Month at the same time by reading Hobart’s annual Baseball Issue. This year, the site plans on rolling out “daily baseball stories, poems, essays, and other baseball miscellany,” so it’s pretty much the Venn diagram overlap of all of your April needs.
Baseball and Poetry: America’s Pastimes
E-Etymology
“Check it out for yourself to marvel at the the long history of our language, including but not limited to the origins of the term ‘rock snot.’” The AV Club reports that the word nerds at Merriam-Webster have launched Time Traveler, a new tool that lets users look at the timing around when new words entered the print lexicon. Consider, also, authority and American usage.
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Some Links
Google put up a special Shakespeare page for easy access to all of his plays through Google Book Search. The Book Search blog has additional details.Latest literary trend story: senators writing books. “About 30 of the 100 currently serving U.S. senators have authored books at some point in their careers, and the number is growing.”A literary trend story continues: Product placement in novels. Earlier instances include efforts from Ford and BMW.In the Guardian, “An American judge intervening in a long-simmering feud has ruled that the rights to John Steinbeck’s most famous novels… should be seized from his publisher and handed to his descendants.”And finally, there’s Ed’s Twenty-One More Reasons Why Litbloggers Are Evil & Unethical
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Poet and Magician
One of the titans of Modernist poetry, Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. to her friends, was psychoanalyzed in the 1930s by none other than Sigmund Freud. Her letters to her friends describe the account in great detail, despite explicit instructions from Freud not to speak about their time together with anyone. This essay from The Millions on video games and Freud is a nice complementary piece.
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Best American Books On Sale
Pretty good deal on Amazon today: All the e-book versions of the “Best American” books are $1.99.
A 20 Year Overnight Success
Joe Fassler interviews recent MacArthur Genius and Year-in-Reading alum Viet Thanh Nguyen on the myth of overnight success, balancing an academic career while still finding time to write novels and the sacrifices all writers must make. Over at Electric Literature.
New Trailer for T.C. Boyle
In 1998, T.C. Boyle released his first massive collection of short stories, titled, appropriately enough, Stories. Clocking in at 700+ pages, the book illustrated the zany profligacy of one our premier short fiction writers. Now Boyle has released a new collection — titled (of course) Stories II — and with it comes a new trailer.
Here to Stay
Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon responds to Jeff Guo’s recent article on the end of the period. As he puts it, “Any long piece without periods — is like a car without brakes. You can drive it, but you’d rather not.”
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