“Here is a rare recording of Flannery O’Connor reading an early version of her witty and revealing essay, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’”
Well, She Should Know
The Poet’s Essay
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews recent Whiting Award-winning poet Brian Blanchfield about his essay collection, Proxies.
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Plotto
Who, or what, is Plotto? Find out about the art of mechanized storytelling, or what a cardboard robot has to do with melodrama and Law & Order.
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Literary Fanfiction?
Here’s an essay you don’t see every day–a fairly passionate defense of the literary merit of “fanfiction.” For a closer look at how fanfiction will go on to be taught in classrooms, here’s Millions staff writer Elizabeth Minkel with more.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Fowler; Kundera; Swyler; George; Arango; Khalastchi; Makkai
Out this week: Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler; The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera; The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler; The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George; The Truth and Other Lies by Sascha Arango; Tradition by Daniel Khalastchi; and Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Pythonated
We’ve published a fair number of pieces about the import of book covers. You may have read one of our US-UK book cover battles. Over at The Awl, Amanda Pickering takes a look at one of the stranger aspects of book design: the animals that appear on the covers of programming books.
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RIP Elizabeth Jane Howard
British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard has died at the age of 90. She was famous for The Cazalet Chronicles and her literary love affairs with Kingsley Amis (one of her three husbands), Cecil Day-Lewis, and Arthur Koestler. Despite that her writing career spanned 60 years, she admitted that she found writing frightening in a recent interview. “You’ve got to be pretty nervous about the challenge, the blank page – anything could be on it, it could be crap or it could be wonderful.”
The Craven
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the jingle-man.” Henry James called his work “decidedly primitive.” Yet Edgar Allan Poe, nearly two centuries after his death, is now acclaimed as a writer on par with his best contemporaries. How did his reputation evolve? In the Times Literary Supplement, Marjorie Perloff reviews a new study of Poe by Jerome McGann.