The late David Rakoff was a longtime Salon contributor, and to celebrate his memory, the site published an excerpt of his rhyming novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, which came out today.
The Giant of Myth
Place Your Bets
This year's Nobel in literature will be announced in early October, so there's still plenty of time to get in on the gambling! Currently leading in all the over/unders? Haruki Murakami, whose book covers we considered here.
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“Will you accept these abs?”
A new season of The Bachelorette is upon us, and we all know what that means: a whole new batch of Leigh Stein’s Bachelorette poems!
Kill Them With Kindness
George Saunders delivered a little publicized convocation at Syracuse University this year. His main advice to the class of 2013 — be kind. "And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE," he said.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ng; Kwok; Moses; Scheft; Ahmad; Fitzgerald
New this week: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng; Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok; The Appetites of Girls by Pamela Moses; Shrink Thyself by the Letterman staff writer Bill Scheft; The Last Taxi Ride by A.X. Ahmad; and the Cambridge University Press edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Taps at Reveille.
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Traveling with Orhan Pamuk
Want to see the real Istanbul? Take a tour with the ultimate guide, Orhan Pamuk. The author showed The New York Times's Joshua Hammer around the city. Pair with: Our review of The Museum of Innocence and our essay on his politics.
The Writer’s Mimicry
“When is it plagiarism, when is it homage? Especially in creative writing, I get tripped up on this distinction. A trick for writer’s block: write an imitation, steal moves, learn by mimicry. For my own poem-writing, I turn to other texts all the time. I pull language, take a word I like, sometimes fragments of phrases and twist them. I get inspired, I want to model after poems I fell madly for.” On discovering another writer’s plagiarism.
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