The reach of literary Brooklyn grows ever larger, as local hub BookCourt mounts a $300,000 campaign to convert the “Bibliobarn,” 160 miles north in the Catskills, into a “bookshop, event space, and writers’ retreat.” Upstaters, lock up your house-cured salume and artisinally sharpened pencils!
Brooklyn is Coming to Eat Your Children
To the Boys of the Street
University of Alabama graduate student Amanda Moore has written a powerful “Open Letter to the Boys of the Street” in which she addresses the troubling and all-too-apparent issue of street harassment. Meanwhile, photographer Hannah Price shares striking images of the Philadelphia men who’ve catcalled her.
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Let’s Relive the Election Through Books
The 2016 election will never truly end, at least not in the literary world. Buzzfeed noted that “a series of recent campaign books have enjoyed monster debuts, demonstrating a voracious reader appetite for behind-the-scenes looks at one of the most surprising elections in history”. And before you think this trend will end any time soon, Buzzfeed lists some up and coming titles that will be published later this year or sometime next year. “The success of campaign books come during a tough period for the publishing world, where industry sources have described the difficulty of getting authors on television or attracting media attention in a frenzied environment focused on Trump.” We’re all about the publishing industry doing well but this seems like a slightly unhealthy obsession for both readers and publishers.
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White Noise on White Noise
“In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, “reviews“ Taylor Swift‘s white noise for The Atlantic.
Punderstrike
At The Hairpin, Alexa C. Kurzius pays a visit to the Punderdome 3000, a monthly “com-pun-tition” that takes place in (where else?) Brooklyn. Among other highlights, the author constructs an alter ego for herself named Pundercat.
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On Genre
Recommended Reading: On the tricky topic of genre. Kate Axelrod writes about her experience when her adult novel was marketed as YA. You could also read our article about why many authors are writing genre fiction.
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Total Eclipse
“I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” Longreads invites us to revisit Annie Dillard‘s classic essay “Total Eclipse,” from her new collection, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.
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Woop Woop
Ohio poet Stanley Gebhardt accused Violent J, a member of Insane Clown Posse, of stealing his poem, “But You Didn’t,” nine years ago and attempting to pass it off as his own. The poem was originally published in A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Bonus: Kent Russell’s dispatch from “The Gathering of the Juggalos.”