Gnarly, dude: Leanne Shapton’s reading her new book at a surf shop.
Siiiick
The End of Beauty
Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”
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Big Screen Brooklyn
A Special Kind of Hell
It seems to be true that everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. In private letters now up for auction, Harper Lee compared Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal resort to hell on earth. Pair with Gabriel Brownstein’s recent essay on Trump as reality turned to cliche.
In Short
What is creepypasta, and what does it have to do with the future of literature? According to this blog post on the Twitter Fiction Festival, it’s a type of short horror fiction which, because it’s posted exclusively on the Web, occupies a similar place to Twitter fiction in the ranks of new literary genres. If you want to learn more about Twitter fiction, you could read our own Elizabeth Minkel on the nascent art form.
Rimbaud in Ethiopia
From The New York Times Travel section, a look at the Ethiopian city where Rimbaud, the poet behind A Season in Hell, “finally found a kind of peace.”
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Robert McCrum on books
Would you rather have a long literary career, or write a brilliant, successful one-off? Robert McCrum considers the literary career arc.
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