“The Navajo Nation’s first-ever Poet Laureate has been named and will be officially introduced to the public on May 17.”
Navajo Nation’s First Poet Laureate
Let’s Trade Manuscripts
"If you ask around, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a really bad novel easily enough. I mean a novel by someone who has spent isolated years writing a book they are convinced is a great work of literature. And when you’re reading it you’ll know it’s bad, and you’ll know what bad truly is." What makes bad writing so bad? Toby Litt at The Guardian investigates.
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Party Animals
“The point of a party is to make us forget we are solitary, wretched and betrothed to death; in other words, to transform us into animals.” Michel Houellebecq offers some handy tips, over at The Believer. Pair with this Millions review of Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory.
Remembering Nora Ephron
The New York Times looks back on Nora Ephron's career and celebrates her distinct tone. EW has collected some of the best quotes from her books. Ariel Levy recalls her first encounter with Ephron's "funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate" voice.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ogawa, Iyer, Irving
New this week: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa and Exodus by Lars Iyer (both were covered in our big book preview). John Irving's In One Person is out in paperback.
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Take Shelter
"I found it hard to escape the sensation that I’d be teaching inside a giant metaphor." Rachel Kadish once taught a creative writing class in a bomb shelter, but rather than stifling her students' work, it allowed her to see how writing can act as a shelter, too.
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Line / Break
The
nightmare
of formatting gone awry: are e-readers bad for poetry?
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…And If You Still Want More on The Pale King
I can't recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan's 7,000-word article on The Pale King highly enough - not because he gets everything right, but because it's what long-form writing about books should look like: passionate, lucid, wide-ranging, and awfully fun to read. I salute GQ for running it, and hope to see more literary coverage there in the future.