“Nuclear Chelsea Air Marshal infrastructure Ionosphere Burst.” You can thank the NSA for this haiku. The NSA Haiku Generator is a website that takes commonly flagged terms and turns them into poetry. Have fun messing up the NSA’s algorithms for a day.
Poetry of Surveillence
A blog by any other name
The New Yorker announced that their literary blog, The Book Bench, will henceforth be called Page-Turner. The name change signals a “building on the work of the Book Bench blog, and expanding on it.” In an inaugural post, Ryan Bloom translates the deceptively simple first line of The Stranger.
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Writer Etiquette
What’s the one question you should never ask a writer starting a new book: how’s the writing going? “Nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready,” Mark Slouka writes. Follow his advice for how to keep your writer friends.
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Multi-Talented Nick Cave
You have to be a little in awe of the multi-disciplinary artist. Musician Nick Cave, who made his screenwriting debut with The Proposition, talks to the New Yorkerabout his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as the multi-media audio book version.
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Showtime Snags Rights to Clinton-Patterson Collaborative Novel
Former President Bill Clinton and best-selling powerhouse James Patterson‘s upcoming novel, The President is Missing, has been acquired as a Showtime television series, according to Vulture. There are few details about the series because the thriller won’t be released until June 2018. See also: our own Bill Morris on reading Patterson for the first time.
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Poetic Pugilists
For anyone searching for some weighty longreads about the current state of poetry, look no further than the lively (and longwinded) debate between Matvei Yankelevich and Marjorie Perloff sparked by the latter’s piece, “Poetry on the Brink.”
Lit Mag Book Trailer
Electric Literature teamed up with animator Jonathan Ashley and musician Nick DeWitt to produce an animated trailer for Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a story which appeared in the literary magazine’s first issue.
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