Lit Mag Unlocked
What’s Your Favorite?
Earlier this week, I told you about a few lists of some really great poetry from 2015. In keeping with the poetic spirit, here’s another fantastic piece from The New York Times in which everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Elena Ferrante talk about their favorite poems of all time.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Solnit, Walls, Kwan, Sullivan, Silver, Lee, al-Shaykh
New this week: The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit, The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls, Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth Silver, Bobcat by Rebecca Lee, and a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan al-Shaykh, with a foreword by Mary Gaitskill.
In the Middle
A lot is written about artists just starting their careers, and about those artists with a lifetime of work to look back over, but in a piece for The Enemy Barry Schwabasky considers the difficulty of being somewhere in the middle of an artistic career. After all, “most artists do, for better or worse, live through what’s come to be known as their midcareer. It’s just that they don’t often do so with ease. … The middle of the journey sometimes seems to be all about losing the way.”
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Art Dealer$
Fresh on the heels of Rachel Cohen’s Believer piece on “the unexpected double history of banking and the art world,” one of the country’s biggest art collectors is slammed with a $276 million insider trading accusation.
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
Dispatch From Last Week’s Episode
What better way to warm up for Leigh Stein’s forthcoming Dispatch From the Future than by reading her ongoing series of reality-TV-inspired poetry, such as this installment for The Bachelorette, Season 8, Episode 2?
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