In The Guardian, Sam Leith reviews Holy Sh*t: A History of Swearing, a new book by Melissa Mohr. In it, Mohr argues that swearing just ain’t what it ****ing used to be, man.
‘Bout Goddamn Time
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.
In Response to Rejections
At the Electric Literature blog, Judson Merrill responds to his many rejection letters: “If you were that excited about my submission, I’m concerned you may have read it with unfair expectations… I’ve reattached my submission under the new title ‘Eight Pages of Tripe’…”
.literature
Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
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Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.
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Light Us Up
For whatever reason, the Zippo lighter has earned a place as an icon of Americana, a symbol of everything simple and reliable in the country. At the Ploughshares blog, Nancy McCabein pays a visit to the Zippo Museum, punctuating her account with quotes from works of literature that feature the lighter.
Tuesday New Release Day: Buntin; El Akkad; Arimah; Meidav; Watts; Bausch
Out this week: Marlena by Julie Buntin; American War by Omar El Akkad; What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah; Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav; No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts; and Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.