To celebrate National Poetry Month, McSweeney’s is publishing daily haikus by the poet Dan Chelotti.
“The internet breeze”
The Immortal Book
Not-so-breaking news: Books are the best way to store information. CDs, flash memory, hard drives, and other digital storage devices aren’t nearly as durable as good old fashioned paper. So the next time someone says you have too many books, just say it’s your attempt at immortality.
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Tuesday New Release Day; Harrison; Jackson; Gioia; Barrett; Reeves; Ng
Out this week: The Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison; Prodigals by Greg Jackson; 99 Poems: New and Selected by Dana Gioia; Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett; Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves; and Slow Boat to China by Kim Chew Ng. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Formative Influence
For every download of “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor,” Philip Roth’s eulogy to his high school teacher, the folks at Audible will donate a dollar to the Newark Public Library. Learn more in The Paris Review Daily’s new interview with Roth.
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Holden Caulfield Has No Friends
Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
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Where to Begin
“I saw a novel with a mysterious-looking black woman on the cover. That was why I picked it up – because of the African woman on the cover of a book in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. I read the first page and my eyes nearly popped out.” Book Riot has a killer roundup of posts in honor of Octavia Butler‘s birthday today, including five other sci-fi authors on being inspired by her writing (that’s Nnedi Okorafor above). Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
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Even More DFW
In honor of this weekend’s U.S. Open, Grantland‘s Michael MacCambridge is revisiting David Foster Wallace‘s epic essay on Roger Federer.
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“I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.”
Anne Carson sits down for a profile with the New York Times, and the results are anything but traditional.