Recommended Reading: Amy Woolard’s poem “Things Go South” at TriQuarterly. “Here, the apple don’t fall/From the tree. Here, whatever you/Find lying on the ground is yours./A scratch-off waiting to strike.”
Poetry from the Road
Jennifer Egan at 15
Maybe the real reason I like Jennifer Egan is that there are so many freckled protagonists in her books. Patricia Zohn at the Huffington Post asks the author about her family, parenting, and her writing obsessions (like freckled faces). She even gets a photo of Egan as a teenager!
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Best New Blogs
A fresh take on the year-end list: Bygone Bureau's Best New Blogs of 2010.
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Orhan Pamuk Discusses Gezi Park
Pankaj Mishra caught up with Orhan Pamuk in the midst of Turkey’s Gezi Park turmoil, and though the Nobel laureate was at first “reluctant to speak of the protests,” he occasionally let down his guard. In those instances, writes Mishra, Pamuk “revealed a shrewd political mind and a confidence about the new social consciousness the demonstrators represent.”
A New Little Women
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: there will soon be another take on Little Women, to be produced by Amy Pascal and adapted by Sarah Polley.
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“Characters are Ciphers”
Peter Mendelsund writes for the Paris Review about how we see, or think we see, fictional characters. "Characters are ciphers. ... We are ever reviewing and reconsidering our mental portraits of characters in novels: amending them, backtracking to check on them, updating them when new information arises."
Free Wodehouse
PSA: Many of P.G. Wodehouse’s earliest stories are available in the public domain. (h/t Anna Wiener)