Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Brave New Serial
Margaret Atwood’s got a new book called Positron out, and she’s going digital: the novel is being published serially via Byliner.
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Prisons From Another World, Another Time
Eric Benson interviewed Bruce Jackson about “the strange and brutal world of Southern prison farms.” Jackson, who recently published a collection entitled Inside the Wire, snapped prison photographs in Texas and Arkansas from 1964 to 1979. The images depict both the mundane and the surreal, occasionally appearing as though they were “taken from a fever dream.”
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Hallberg an NBCC Balakian Finalist
Congratulations to our own Garth Risk Hallberg, who was a finalist for the Nona A. Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the NBCC. Critic William Deresiewicz took home the prize. We wrote up the finalists in the fiction and non-fiction categories yesterday.
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Fireproof Books
AbeBooks points to clever fireproof editions of Farenheit 451 and Stephen King’s Firestarter. (Thanks Laurie)
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Very Brief Respites from the Darkness
Want to learn filmmaking from a self-proclaimed “soldier of cinema”? Then sign up for a class with Werner Herzog. The enigmatic director, whose films include Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo, announced he’ll be teaching a course in the summer through the online provider Masterclass.
“Oh, you Irish—you’re such MAR-velous storytellers”
The Testament of Mary author Colm Tóibín was interviewed as part of the President’s Reading Series at Johns Hopkins University, and he spoke about the difference between “being a reader, and being an Irish reader.”