Do you love the city of Miami Beach? Prove it with a poem. At stake is a two night stay at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club, and the deadline for submissions is December 2nd.
That’s One Way to Get to Miami
Oldest-Ever Quran Unearthed
A Yemeni man claims to have unearthed the oldest copy of the Quran in the world. An inscription engraved on the manuscript’s first page indicates that it dates back to 815 AD.
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Parsing the Subtext
Summer Reading at The Brooklyn Rail
Want to know what artists Paul Chan and Richard Serra, poet Eileen Myles, and translator Charlotte Mandell are reading this summer? Check out The Brooklyn Rail’s Summer Reading List.
My Body Shall Be All Yours
“I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.” From James Joyce to Frida Kahlo, The Guardian collects bits of great artists' erotic missives to one another. And speaking of literary love letters, how about Nicholson Baker's Vox [ed. note: it makes a great Valentine's Day gift]?
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Longlisting Other Languages
PEN America has announced the longlist for its 2017 Translation Prize, including Deborah Smith for Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see our review here), Carlos Rojas for Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, and Victoria Cribb for Sjón's Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. (We profiled Sjón's work at length a few years back!) The winner will be announced in February of 2017.
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Book Decor
Will books in white wrappers become this year's deer head? At The New York Times: Physical books find new life as design objects.