At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin interviews the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose new anthology of stories, The Love Object, comes out as an e-book this week. Among other things, she compares a writer who works on a book for only one day a week with a parent who leaves a toddler unsupervised: “You can’t find it again.”
Not a Soirée
2017 Albertine Prize Finalists Announced
Three finalists have been named for this year’s $10,000 Albertine Prize: Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal, and Bardo or Not Bardo by Antoine Volodine. Voting is open until Sunday, April 30th. Also, you can read more about Volodine’s work courtesy of Grant Munroe.
The Gallery of Lost Art
The Gallery of Lost Art is “an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared,” and my-oh-my is it a doozy of an internet diversion.
The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance
(Reluctantly) Recommended Reading: On the surprising racism of children's books.
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The Gray Salt Sea, The Wine-Dark Sea
Writing for Lapham’s Quarterly, Caroline Alexander takes a deep dive into Homer’s “wine-dark sea” to uncover the origins and meaning behind the poet’s “incomprehensible” phrase.
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Vacation Links
We have returned from Los Angeles, where it was so sunny and warm, to Chicago, where it is so cloudy and cold. It actually rained briefly one of the days we were in LA, and we thought it was hilarious that everyone kept apologizing for it. If people apologized for bad weather in Chicago, nobody would have time to talk about anything else. Anyway, I've spent the day catching up on e-mails, RSS feeds, blogs and the like, and I thought I'd share the links that caught my eye.Mad Max Perkins, editor and secret-identity blogger, returned from a long hiatus to reveal the title of the novel that he had gotten so excited about editing back when he was a regular blogger. The novel is Dope by Sara Gran, and I have to admit, I'm very intrigued. In the process, Perkins revealed himself to be none other than Dan Conaway of Penguin Putnam, as Sarah at GalleyCat explains.At BookLust, a gorgeous sculpture constructed out of books.Hikikomori, Japan's epidemic of shut ins. In the New York Times.An oddly terrifying look at all the psychological engineering that goes on in reality shows: The Omarosa Experiment at The Morning News.Hilarious and informative: Outrageous firsts in television history.Jonathan Yardley's review of Michael D'Antonio's Hershey gives an interesting snapshot of the chocolate magnate's life.
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“No law books, no text books, no science books. ONLY POETRY!”
The Paris Review profiles the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, located in Cambridge, MA and one of two all-poetry book stores in the nation. And speaking of bookstores - if you're visiting Boston for AWP 2013, Ploughshares has got a whole list of literary landmarks for you to explore.
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Shop Talk
There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.