A forthcoming anthology of Swedish crime fiction – fittingly entitled A Darker Shade of Sweden – will contain a piece from a 17-year-old Stieg Larsson, reports Julie Bosman. The book will be published this February.
Stieg Larsson’s High School Fiction
Express Literature
In São Paulo, books also serve as subway cards — i.e., the future of literature.
“You were a dream of ice.”
Recommended Reading: Delaney Nolan’s “Buoyed Nets or a Towered Light Spinning”
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Look Away
“Recently, a friend told me she didn’t like pictures of herself because she never looked the way she thought she did in her head. I think this pretty much describes the universal horror that is looking at your own photos, and that’s why I love the selfie so much. It gives you all the controls to the story you are telling.” In defense of the selfie.
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Cult Classic
Frank Stanford isn’t the most well-known American poet, but he is one of the most revered, at least according to his contemporaries. At The Rumpus, David Biespeil writes about a new collection of the poet’s work, remarking that “no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.”
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“These gentlemen simply had too many dreams in common.”
Recommended Reading: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower journeyed to Tupelo, Mississippi in order to investigate the man who mailed ricin to Barack Obama.
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Medieval Advice
Need to know how to tell if someone is or is not dead? How to leave a party gracefully? How to avoid the plague? Luckily the writers of the Middle Ages had a how-to book for everything, even if that advice does include killing bed bugs by “Spread[ing] Gun-powder, beaten small, about the crevices of your bedstead” and then lighting it.
Intersections and Turns
Recommended Reading: Noy Holland on writing fiction, a form rooted in deft timing, accidents, and revelations.
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The Better Angels of Our Nature
Steven Pinker‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature posits that human violence is becoming less and less common in civilized culture. If your interest was piqued by the book’s review in The New York Times, you will no doubt be interested in his Edge Master Class as well.