Recommended Reading: The latest issue of Asymptote, which features work from Péter Nádas and an interview with Anne Carson. (Bonus: Carson has a poem up on The New Republic’s website.)
New Asymptote Featuring Péter Nádas and Anne Carson
The Hunt for Foul Balls
The town that named its football team after a famous American poem has outdone itself in terms of literature-sports crossovers: for their home opener tomorrow, the Baltimore Orioles will be wearing a special patch commemorating author Tom Clancy.
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Come On, Karma
From Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, here are five of the most annoyingly unpunished characters in all of literature. Can we petition to have Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) added to this list?
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Draw Hard
Harold and the Purple Crayon is a classic children’s book. Is it also a writing guide? In an essay for Bookslut, Mairead Case explains why she re-reads it whenever she’s finishing a project: the main character’s need to create a room for himself is a corollary to the writing process.
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Sarah Palin, White Goddess
N+1’s Marco Roth turns in an ambitious and historically nuanced exploration of white grievance in a putatively postracial America. Highly recommended.
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Sandra Cisneros on Reaching Non-Readers with Her Books
Sandra Cisneros reflects on the enduring legacy of The House on Mango Street and how it was able to reach audiences around the world.
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No Lie
“One lie I tell is that we care, generally—human beings—about each other. We could not, I tell myself in the moments just before the night’s dark hour, create The Odyssey or King Lear or Thomas and Beulah without a profound sense of The Other. Surely, were it true this thing’s a joke, nothing more, and a cruel one at that, we’d have no Dickinson, no Yeats, no freakin’ Rumi, read by Bly, loud on an old tape deck while I shower.” Pablo Tanguay on the art of lying.