2,000 recently digitized copies of Ernest Hemingway’s papers will be transferred from Cuba to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library – this will be the first time copies of the papers will be available to U.S. researchers. As of right now, I don’t believe there are any plans to return the urinal Hemingway took from a Key West bar to its proper location in Sloppy Joe’s.
The End of the Hemingway Embargo
The Right to Be Average
“The call isn’t for a literature to, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has described, stop people from hitting us. [...] But for a multiplicity of presence. A mingling, if not an acceptance, of a duality of presence. The right to be average. For the black guys in our literary fiction, if nowhere else, to be given the benefit of the doubt.” Over at the Ploughshares blog, Bryan Washington makes a case for inclusion in literary fiction.
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Entourage v. Mad Men
Is "Entourage" just "Mad Men" set in modern times? This article, of course, must be paired with Carles' Grantland piece, "I Don't Want to Bro Up, I'm an 'Entourage' Kid."
Citizen Bezos
Jeff Bezos married a novelist, "expressed a passionate devotion to books", and may be the one person mild-mannered indie bookshop owners hate more than any other. How'd that happen? After perusing a short history from the New York Review of Books, see for yourself with our vintage news announcements on Amazon's innovations in pay-per-page pricing, now-old products like the Kindle, and its industry-changing acquisitions of The Washington Post and the English language.
Great to Not Great
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
Yes, Kate
Recommended (Revolutionary) Reading: On why Kate Millett's Sexual Politics remains so relevant to today's most heated literary arguments, despite its being nearly fifty years old at this point.
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Stories in Verse
In 2010, the poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Bangladesh to speak with the survivors of the 1971 Liberation War. Eventually, she wrote a poetry collection about those interviews, which went on to win the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. At The Paris Review Daily, Sean Carman interviews Faizullah.
Write Through It
Julia Heaberlin, whose novel Playing Dead published this week, discusses the not-so-pretty truths of writing, rejection, and perseverance.
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