California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera dropped in on NPR as guest DJ last week, and you can listen to the full thirty-minute radio show, as well as five of the tracks he played.
DJ Poet Laureate
What’s Wrong with a Readable Book?
There is a controversy brewing right now in Britain about readability and excellence in literature. Apparently, being “readable” is no longer a compliment.
Lish’s Legacy
Gordon Lish is famous for being Raymond Carver’s very involved editor, but his work has never been thoroughly considered before. David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli have set out to change that with a roundtable discussion of Lish’s legacy. “What can we learn from Lish? Well, we can take away a set of techniques, to be sure; ‘rules,’ if rules are useful to us. But we can also salvage something that looks almost lost in our time: a sense of the real, lived stakes of writing, its risks and its rewards.”
“My life when I was that age was such a disaster”
Recommended Reading: Lindsay Whalen’s interview with Lev Grossman, which goes nicely with our review of The Magicians.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Tinti; Enard; Shattuck; Matthews; Sontag
Out this week: The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti; Compass by Mathias Enard; The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck; Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews; and the Later Essays of Susan Sontag. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Librarians on the Front Lines
“There are times it’s happening multiple times a day. Not too long ago, we had two in the same restroom at the same time. We call security, security calls paramedics. Of course they always find somebody lying there.” Samantha Sanders writes for Catapult about the epidemic of opioid overdoses in public libraries, and what some librarians are doing to respond. And ICYMI, here is Corinne Purtill in our own pages about British libraries under austerity cuts.
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Redefining Our Image of Book Collectors
This past Monday The Paris Review revealed the winners of the first annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting prize. This prize is different from the average literary prize because it focuses on celebrating women under 30 who have a passion for collecting books. The prize was created by the Brooklyn bookstore, Honey & Wax. The owners “O’Donnell and Romney had observed that although the young women who entered their store were passionate about their collections, they rarely referred to themselves as collectors. Their hope is to ‘encourage young women who are actively collecting books to own and share that part of their lives, and to think strategically about the future of their collections.’” Meet the women and their incredible collections here and pair it with our post on the complete archives of The Paris Review.
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Murakami Profiled
Ahead of 1Q84 hitting shelves next week, Sam Anderson’s big profile of Haruki Murakami has arrived. Also don’t miss Chip Kidd‘s discussion of 1Q84‘s book design.
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