The literary archives of Gwendolyn Brooks – the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize – are headed to the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The haul amounts to more than “150 boxes stuffed with manuscripts, drafts, revisions, correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, homemade chapbooks in which Brooks neatly handwrote her earliest (unpublished) poems, and heavy bronze awards ensconced in velvet-lined boxes collected later in her career.”
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Archives Headed to Urbana-Champaign
Stories in Verse
In 2010, the poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Bangladesh to speak with the survivors of the 1971 Liberation War. Eventually, she wrote a poetry collection about those interviews, which went on to win the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. At The Paris Review Daily, Sean Carman interviews Faizullah.
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And You Thought Literary Magazines Had It Rough
Trouble might lie ahead for Skymall. Rohin Dhar makes the case in The Atlantic that everybody’s favorite in-flight magazine might’ve just merged with a dubious “nutraceuticals” company in need of SEC scrutiny.
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The Men Who Stare at Goats
What would the child of The Big Lebowski characters The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) look like? Maybe like Lt. Col. Django (Bridges, again), one of the characters in Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare at Goats, set to release in November, a comedy about the U.S. military’s attempt to train psychic soldiers (based on the book by Jon Ronson).
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Tuesday New Release Day: Millhauser, Matar, Shakar, Fuller, Chez Panisse
Steven Millhauser’s new collection We Others is out this week, as are Hisham Matar’s Anatomy of a Disappearance and Alex Shakar’s Luminarium. Here at The Millions, Shakar recently offered the harrowing story of the publication of his first novel. Alexandra Fuller has a new memoir out. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. and foodies are celebrating with 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering.
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Excerpt from Good on Paper
Rachel Cantor’s pub day for Good on Paper (included in our first-half preview) was this Tuesday. Check out an excerpt from the novel at Lit Hub.
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Tonight on 4th Avenue: Victor LaValle and Robert Lopez
Tonight at the Pacific Standard Fiction Series in Brooklyn, Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine (which, according to Edan boasts “one of the best voices to come out of literature in the last…oh, ever, probably”), will be reading with Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River. As usual, I’ll be hosting; it would be great to see you there. For more information, see Time Out New York.