“For too long I have been aggravated by the unabashed exploitation of the thieving filmmaker. He profits shamelessly from my existential despair.” Say hello to Henri, the Existential Cat.
La Nausee
De La Pava Up for PEN American Literary Prize
As part of its 2013 literary awards, the PEN American Center will grant nearly $150,000 to writers, editors, and translators through sixteen different awards and fellowships, and for the first time ever they’ve decided to publish their shortlist online. Among the finalists is Sergio De La Pava, whose novel A Naked Singularity is up for the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut work. You might recall our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s profile of De La Pava last summer, and you can catch a glimpse of the author’s next book on our Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
Two-fer from Kiš
Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, recently profiled by Sam Sacks, has two short pieces up on the Bomb! website.
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J.D. Salinger’s Stories: Read Them If You Must
OK, so you’ve read our article about why you should respect J.D. Salinger’s wishes by not reading his unpublished stories, but you’ve also noticed that nobody’s really said anything about his stories that are out-of-print.
:) :’) :-)
Two weeks ago, the Internet Gods (meaning: the Unicode 7.0 update) gave us hundreds of new emoji symbols, including the middle finger and peace dove. By now our emoji usage patterns can be used by psychologists to understand our minds. “People who use no noses tend to be tweeting more about… Justin Bieber. They have younger interests, younger concerns, whether or not they’re younger.”
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I’ve Got Ideas
If you have a blog, you’ve probably fielded suggestions from your relatives about what you should write, who you should write about and what personal issues you should address in your posts. At The Hairpin, Michelle Markowitz shares a conversation with her mother on the subject.
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New from John Ashbery
Recommended Reading: New poetry from John Ashbery in the January 18th issue of the New Yorker. If you’re looking for inspiration, read Ashbery, “buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation” of the poet’s work.
Homesteading Alone
So you’ve bought the books on Urban Homesteading, but what you really want is to escape completely and build your own comfy cabin in the woods. Here are three books by Homesteaders who “go it alone.”
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Terrible Beauty
Nobody needs reminding that Yeats was a major poet, but it can be easy to forget, a hundred years of his major work, just why his poetry has endured. In The Irish Times, Denis O’Donoghue makes a forceful case for Yeats’s relevance, arguing that “Yeats solved, or came closer than any other modern poet in English to solving, the problem that defeated so many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the claims of common speech, morally responsible, with the insisted-on autonomy of the poem.”
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