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
In the Mind of the Author
At The Rumpus, Suzanne Koven talks with Eve Ensler, better known as the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues. Among other things, they talk about her new book, In the Body of the World.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Strayed, Iweala, Claudel, Andersen, Boyne, Hemingway, Dream Team, Pollack
Cheryl Strayed’s collection of “Dear Sugar” columns is out this week (read our review). Also out are Our Kind of People by Uzodinma Iweala, The Investigation by Philippe Claudel, True Believers by Kurt Andersen, and The Absolutist by John Boyne. The new edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms with all the extra endings is out, as is (just in time for the Olympics) an oral history of the original Dream Team. Donald Ray Pollack’s The Devil All the Time is out in paperback.
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Luck Runs Out
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Writermaker
At The Daily Beast, a reading list by the novelist Nick Harkaway, who claims that he reads so many books at once that “if the stack fell on me I’d be injured.” Back in March, our own Emily St. John Mandel reviewed his second novel, Angelmaker.
New Marilynne!
Marilynne Robinson has a new essay (excerpted from her new book When I Was a Child I Read Books) out in Guernica, and if you’re still reading this sentence because you haven’t yet clicked the link, that’s incredible.
Picturing Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was one of the first people to use photography to control meaning. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American catalogues his many portraits and how they contributed to our perception of Douglass. Our own Edan Lepucki writes about the place of slave narratives in fiction.
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You’ve Been Sleeping on Romance Novels
“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Jamie Green writes for Buzzfeed about how romance novels have gotten more feminist over the years (and still getting a happily ever after) and people are now starting to sit up and take notice.
100 Plays for the First (Trump) Hundred Days
Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play every day during Trump’s first 100 days as president which will be published next year as 100 Plays for the First Hundred Days. She talks to American Theatre about why she decided to undertake such a project, how difficult the process was and the importance of showing up and being present. Includes excerpts from the book.