On Monday, November 4th, Paul Muldoon, Colum McCann, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and Jean Kennedy Smith will pay tribute to the recently deceased poet with a free, Off-Broadway production entitled Remembering Seamus: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Seamus Heaney.
Remembering Seamus Heaney
“Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism”
Apart from calling up visions of a Carver-Mailer axis of literary minimalism, these remarks by Joyce Carol Oates upon winning the Mailer Prize convince us that Mailer had quite the unflappable ego.
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Letter from a Pulitizer Juror
Michael Cunningham, who alongside Maureen Corrigan and Susan Larson sat on the jury of the Pulitzer Prize for for fiction, gives the clearest account yet of how the award process works and defends the three shortlisted titles. His letter is in two parts, he also addresses the function of judgment and begins to build a poetics of literary greatness.
“Give things away”
Recommended Reading: this interview with poet Lucie Brock-Broido, whose new book Stay, Illusion is a finalist for the National Book Award.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Doodles
When Kurt Vonnegut wasn't writing, he was drawing. "The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza," he said. The New Yorker has a slideshow of 10 of his cubist sketches. You can find more of his doodles in the new book Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.
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Confessions of a Theorist
"This is the odd space these Theory Generation novels inhabit, making them peculiar novels of ideas. Their writers have read enough Theory at a young enough age to be in continued thrall to its power; they do justice to the disorienting shock those texts once had, and perhaps still have. Yet they are old enough to ironize (tenderly or bitterly) that power." Are you a member of the theory generation?
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An Objective Look at Seven M.F.A. Rejections
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, an objective look at seven M.F.A. program rejections compared to other historic rejections.
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