Can’t get enough of Orange is the New Black? Neither could The Missouri Review. Their new blog series, Literature on Lockdown, shares narratives from those who teach or write in prisons. This week’s post comes from Ace Boggess, a poet who spent five years in a West Virginia prison. “One thing about being a writer in prison is that you have not lost everything. You still have that driving need to speak whatever truth you know in whatever way you can. No one can take that away from you, not even the State.”
Jailhouse Rock
The Via Crucis of the Book
“All of a sudden, things that should be banal, like a person’s face—the fact that a person has a face—becomes extremely disorienting. In these moments, I think it’s important to keep those strange commas.” In an illuminating interview for Asymptote, Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson talks about the thrills and challenges in translating The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions review of the collection.
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The 250
You may not have known that Thomas Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia – also found time to amass the largest contemporary collection of books in North America. For sixteen years, The Library of Congress has been trying to track down copies of the final 250 listed in Jefferson’s collection.
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Writing Home
Your daily Canada: Michael LaPointe wonders what happened to the genre of CanLit.
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Chante, You Stay
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexander Stein takes a look at lip-syncing, gender performativity, and the greatest television show ever made, RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Lorrie Moore, Short Stories, and America
Good news, fans of short stories, Lorrie Moore, and America! The author is editing a special edition of the Best American series, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories, to be released in October.
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All Your Favorite Books
This week in book-related infographics that are also, as an added bonus, interactive: “A Google Map of All Your Favorite Books,” via Electric Literature.