Poetry from the Road

This week in news that’s almost impossible to believe: after an intense bidding war, the rights to David Grann’s upcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon were bought by Imperative Entertainment for a whopping five million dollars. All this for a nonfiction book that isn’t due out for well over a year. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the investigation into the mysterious deaths of several Osage Indians in the 1920s, who were at the time some of the wealthiest people in the world. The case was one of the first ever worked by the FBI.

I’ve got another post up about Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers at the LBC Blog. I’ve been going back and forth with Sam (of Golden Rule Jones), so check out his posts, too.Calvin Trillin talks turducken and other things Cajun in the most recent issue of National Geographic. The piece is typical Trillin, funny and featuring mouth-watering descriptions of various regional delicacies. (Much like the articles collected in a favorite book of mine, Trillin’s Feeding a Yen)Jim Crace discusses his Guardian column, The Digested Read, “The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers’ hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves.” A collection of the columns is out in EnglandThe CS Monitor takes a look at the self-publishing craze: “IUniverse, which prints several thousand books annually, reports submissions are up 17 percent in the first six months of this year.”A couple of new McSweeney’s offerings that you may or may not have seen already. Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things… is anthology for young adults, edited by Lemony Snicket and with stories by Nick Hornby, John Scieszka and Neil Gaiman, among others. Meanwhile Issue #17 of their Quarterly Concern is also out. According to Amazon: “Issue 17 is not an ordinary issue of McSweeney’s. It is, however, an ordinary bundle of mail, stacked and rubber-banded, containing the usual items: a recent issue of Yeti Researcher, a sausage-basket catalog, a flyer for slashed prices on multi-user garments, a couple letters… the usual. Also: the debut of a DVD quarterly, featuring never-before-seen work by Spike Jonze and David O. Russell. Also: stories.”

John Clare, “the peasant poet,” wrote wide-ranging poems on rural themes, distinguishing himself from his peers in the 19th-century literary scene in England. In 1830, in the midst of an episode of depression, he wrote a long polemic against the first-person pronoun, in the form of a letter to his friend Eliza Emmerson. In The Paris Review Daily, an excerpt of the letter.