It was probably inevitable that Rap Genius would spawn Poetry Genius, but it was not so inevitable that Junot Díaz would make an appearance on the latter. On Saturday, Díaz annotated a number of passages from his own The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, including a footnote where he says he went “buckwild.”
A Note from the Author
LARB talks TNI
Rachel Rosenfelt, Editor in Chief of The New Inquiry, gets interviewed by Evan Kindley, Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. In their conversation, Rosenfelt reveals that TNI‘s prevailing editorial principle is: “Is this boring? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, then it’s not for us.”
For David Foster Wallace Completists
A new anthology out from Da Capo Press, Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, includes an essay by David Foster Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, on how books helped her cope with his death: “I’ll try not to use the word survive. I think I’ve determined, by trial and error, that certain underlined, highlighted, and dog-eared books, in conjunction with pharmaceuticals, are beneficial after a trauma. What was it the realtor called it? ‘The Incident.’ Books can be helpful after an Incident.” (Thanks, Diavanna)
New Murakami in 2014
Parul Sehgal in NYTBR
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In Kanye Land
What happens when you put one of the biggest literary egos together with music’s biggest ego? A movie. Bret Easton Ellis is working with Kanye West on a film. “He came and asked me to write the film,” Ellis told Vice. “I didn’t want to at first. Then I listened to Yeezus…I thought, regardless of whether I’m right for this project, I want to work with whoever made this.” This is an interesting pairing because Kanye definitely isn’t a reader.
The Kite and the String
“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.” The Atlantic has an excellent contribution to the age-old thesis that creativity and madness are inextricably linked–and tied, moreover, to mental illness–based in part on a sample of students at Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Pair with another essay on creativity and the “touch of madness” from our own archives.
Teju Cole’s also done the same thing with the first page or so of Open City: http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Teju-cole-open-city-excerpt-lyrics