Recommended Reading: Dean Young’s poem “Why I Haven’t ‘Outgrown Surrealism,’ No Matter What That Moron Reviewer Wrote” for Plume.
The Surreal World
Ireland’s Favorite Poem
Though traditionally a cultural staple, Irish poetry's popularity has been on the decline for some time now. The best way to reignite public interest? A contest, of course, and Seamus Heaney just won. His sonnet "When all the others were away at Mass" was voted "Ireland’s best-loved poem written over the past 100 years."
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Baldwin; Lacey; Lim; Berman; Umrigar; Fierro
Out this week: The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin; The Answers by Catherine Lacey; Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim; Perennials by Mandy Berman; Everybody's Son by Thrity Umrigar; and The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Like a Career in the NBA
"The myth of the full-time writer is a perniciously sticky one—and it doesn’t help that once in a blue moon a J.K. Rowling does come along, thereby entrenching the cultural delusion that being a full-time writer is a thing that could realistically happen. But the truth is that being a full-time writer is basically just the literary equivalent of a career in the NBA." Liz Entman Harper talks with seven writers about the struggle to balance writing with a day job, and those interviews pair well with our own Emily St. John Mandel's look at "Working the Double Shift."
●
●
Press Play
The New York Times unveiled a new music blog entitled Press Play. Each week, the blog will “present tracks from an upcoming new album.”
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
Sappho’s Music
Recommended reading: on attempting to reconstruct the music of Sappho.
●
●
Perennial Errata
The New York Times issues a correction note for something they've been messing up for 25 years.
●
●
BLM, the Novel
"Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do," he said. "Keep your hands visible. Don't make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you." Read an excerpt from the Black Lives Matter–inspired YA novel The Hate U Give by A. C. Thomas, scheduled for release next June. See also some of our favorite writers on their favorite political writing, or our review of Nate Marshall’s poetry collection, Wild Hundreds, which critic Emmanuel N. Adolf Alzuphar called "the foremost articulation of contemporary blackness’s dynamism in literature."
●
●
Peeling Back the “Mask of the Whiskey Gentry”
In a long investigation of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic essay, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (PDF), Josh Roiland takes readers to church by pointing out exactly what’s so alluring about the piece, which “scholars often point to … as the origin of Gonzo Journalism.”
●
●
Beautiful poem, thank you for passing it along.