Recommended Reading: “Fog Count” by Leslie Jamison, which is a stunning piece of writing about West Virginia, coal country, an ultramarathon runner, the American housing crisis, its nightmarish prison system, and so, so much more.
Fog Count
The Millions at the Critical Hit Awards
Hooray! Electric Literature has declared Jesse Jarnow’s Millions review of Fear of Music the winner in the category of Best Deconstruction for their occasional Critical Hit Awards.
Asian American Short Story Contest
Hyphen Magazine/Asian American Writers’ Workshop are co-sponsoring a short story contest, judged by Alexander Chee and Jaed Coffin. $1,000 prize and publication in Hyphen, open to all U.S. and Canadian writers of Asian descent. Details here.
Tuesday New Release Day
Milan Kundera’s new collection of essays, Encounter, is now out. And for those still trying to figure out Inception, the shooting script has been published.
5,000 Twitterers!
Congrats to @Jschancellor for being the 5,000th follower of @The_Millions! #balloondrop (Everyone go congratulate @Jschancellor on Twitter!)
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The Best Web Publications Are Also The Youngest
Between the 40 Towns project organized by Jeff Sharlet’s Dartmouth students and the newly unveiled Vanishing Point project from Duncan Murrell’s students at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, it seems abundantly clear that college students are better at putting together web publications than 99% of established publishing outfits. Begin your tour with Christine Delp’s look at a blind man who makes his own martinis, and then check out other stories such as Ge Jin’s photographic essay on Chinese university students.
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Where Are You, Mr. Watterson?
This month the Cleveland International Film Festival will show Dear Mr. Watterson, a film exploring “how … a simple comic strip became so meaningful to such a massive and diverse group of people.” Yet despite the subject matter, the actual author of the Calvin and Hobbes series will almost certainly be absent from the screenings. Over at Full Stop, Liv Combe looks at the ways Bill Watterson is “keeping the idea of the private public figure alive.”
Baseball and Poetry: America’s Pastimes
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.
“The point is she’s doing ballet badly”
As part of their Sunday Interview series, The Rumpus had a chat with Leslie Jamison, who talked to Martha Bayne about The Empathy Exams, the ubiquity of Frozen and the pathos of Taylor Swift. If you like, you could also take a look at our own Edan Lepucki’s interview with Jamison, or else read Ryan Teitman’s review of The Empathy Exams.
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