Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
Book(case) Criticism
Aura Estrada Short Story Contest
Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Contest is underway. This year’s submissions will be judged by What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank author (as well as Year in Reading contributor) Nathan Englander, and the victor will earn a $1,500 prize as well as publication.
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Football Book Club: Louisa Hall’s ‘Speak’
This week, the upstanding men and women of Football Book Club are reading Louisa Hall’s novel Speak — and posting about (a) having their minds blown by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and (b) having their metaphoric hearts metaphorically stomped on by the NFL.
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East of Edam
What goes better together than wine and cheese? Authors and cheese. The Airship paired ten gourmet cheeses with famous writers. Virginia Woolf goes well with a Bayley Hazen Blue. “This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives – the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will.”
Another Perspective
“I believe that just as much as teens fear time, adults do as well. It would be selfish of us to think that they can understand and accept our evolution into adulthood much easier than we can. Maybe in reality, teenagers and parents are scared of the same things.” The LARB runs a 15-year-old reader’s honest review of The Fault in Our Stars.
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Love Ever Write Often
“The way (Yeats) puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between.” The Paris Review has published a brief, fascinating letter written by Samuel Beckett to his aunt Cissie Sinclair containing an original poem and some positive criticism of the painter Jack B. Yeats. Top it off with this essay by Elizabeth Winkler about language, style, and translation–and how any of that might help to make sense of Beckett’s convoluted legacy.
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