“With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea,” our own Michael Bourne writes in his Dispatches column at The Common, “Stanley Street.”
Dispatches from Down Under
A Pulitzer Winner ‘First’ Turns 101
June 7th would have been Gwendolyn Brooks‘ 101st birthday. In remembrance of her we encourage you to read her works and reflect on a legacy. To get you started Shondaland has a good primer on this cool poet, who became the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize. Pair it with this essay on Brooks and reading outside your culture.
Airport Casualties
“I would venture to assume that all Muslim Americans felt the weight of this paradox in the years after September 11th, and never more so than when at the airport.” On the post-9/11 world, over at The Rumpus.
The Paper Trail
What writers are actually earning money? Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel takes a look at the new Author Earnings report, which scours Amazon bestseller lists and extrapolates the data to make claims about the state of publishing and self-publishing. Here’s an older Millions piece by Edan Lepucki on self-publishing as supplemental and influential to the traditional route.
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Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time.
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Can You Learn to Love the Adverb?
The saying goes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” but at Beyond the Margins Robin Black makes the opposite argument. “I want you to love adverbs,” she begins, but “more than that, I want you to believe, as I do, that adverbs are the part of speech that best captures the human condition.”
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“The sanitising effect of augury”
In a time of crisis, any decision is better than no decision at all. That line–credited to Theodore Roosevelt–is pop conventional wisdom. An excellent piece at Aeon explores the full implications of the line, and may just convince you that your next impossible choice should be made by a soothsayer, a lottery, or a flipped coin.
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