“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
Solitary Reader
Rebecca Solnit writes on loneliness, intimacy, and writing in The Faraway Nearby. Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed the book at The Millions.
●
●
A Wasted Life
"I have wasted my life." Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring takes a look at James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" and the many interpretations readers have brought to its famous last line. Among those readers is David Mitchell, who wrote about the same poem in an essay for The Atlantic's By Heart series earlier this year.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Hassman, Taylor, Nooteboom, Powell
New this week: Tupelo Hassman's debut Girlchild, a pair of novels -- Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek -- by Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) from NYRB Classics featuring introductions by Hilary Mantel and Caleb Crain, Self-Portrait of an Other, prose poems by Cees Nooteboom, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, a new poetry collection from D.A. Powell.
●
●
The Wrath of the Translator
The English Illiad, compared: a look at the translations of Robert Fagles, Anthony Verity, Stephen Mitchell, and more.
●
●
“New” Zora Neale Hurston
The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston never before reprinted.
The Art of the Recommendation
Laura Miller at Salon reports on the fine art of recommending books - “too delicate a task to leave to e-commerce robots” - and the literary types who are now stepping in to offer their advice.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Rachman; Card; Winton; Conn; Dugan; Pritchett; Flynn; Yejide
The Imperfectionists author and Year in Reading alum Tom Rachman has a new novel on shelves this week, as does Orson Scott Card. Also out: Eyrie by Tim Winton; O, Africa! by Andrew Lewis Conn; So Much a Part of You by Polly Dugan; Stars Go Blue by Laura Pritchett; Third Rail by Rory Flynn; and Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejide.