“And when she champions authors, she explains specifically what makes their work special. No vague parroting of Kakutani reviews here. She gives you the straight dope.” How do you say goodbye to your favorite bookstore?
The Hardest Goodbye
“I’ve known you and known you and known you.”
Recommended Reading: Delaney Nolan’s recent piece in Guernica, “How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning.”
One hundred tons of wisdom and learning
Ryeberg, an online magazine of writers curating YouTube videos, has a handy guide to creating an ebook in 8 easy steps. Step number 2: “Transform the information from the tape into static cosmic energy.”
Tuesday New Release Day
Julia Child fans may enjoy a new collection of her correspondence with her friend and “unofficial literary agent” Avis DeVoto. The letters follow Child through her life overseas. Also out now is a snazzy new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray with a cover illustrated by Ruben Toledo.
●
●
Poetry of Lost Cultures
Recommended Reading: M. Soledad Caballero’s poem about cultural displacement “Losing Spanish” at The Missouri Review. “In the Oklahoma panhandle, she did not remember the sirens, the curfews”
●
●
Here Are Your Hugo Winners
The 2017 Hugo Award winners were announced in Helsinki, reports io9. For the second year in a row N.K. Jemisin came away with the best novel prize for her latest, The Obelisk Gate, and Ursula K. Le Guin (whom we interviewed a few years back) took “best related work” for her collection Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.
Listening to Joyce
We’ve written before about various rare recordings of authors reading that occasionally surface on the internet (a sample here) but today we add a new author: James Joyce. Open Culture has posted two recordings of the author reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and while the audio quality is exactly what you would expect for recordings made in the 1920s, we still recommend listening.