What was it like to grow up with Wordsworth or Coleridge as your dad? Hint: it was weird. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
I Leave You My Daffodils
East of Here
Recommended Reading: This interview with the director of the National Steinbeck Center.
Good Grief!
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and now is as good a time as any to revisit R. Sikoryak’s Good ol’ Gregor Brown. Our own Matt Seidel’s essay on The Metamorphosis is perfect for those craving more Kafka.
In Today’s Terms
Recommended Reading: On queer terminology and writing queer history.
Art as Activism
“In the media there are a very limited number of ways that people are used to seeing sex-worker characters, and I definitely wanted to break out of that.” The Los Angeles Review of Books interviews Aya de León about her debut novel, Uptown Thief.
Oral Histories Galore
2011 is the year of television’s oral history. On the heels of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, published last May and reviewed by n+1 here, you can now check out I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. You can whet your appetite with an excerpt here. If television’s not your thing, you can also check out New York Magazine‘s oral history of the Upright Citizens Brigade, and of the founding of Ms. magazine.
Blurbing for Laughs
“New” Zora Neale Hurston
The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston never before reprinted.