Recommended Reading: Mai Der Vang’s striking poem about displacement “Light From a Burning Citadel” at The Missouri Review. “Once this highland was our birthplace. Once we were children of kings.”
Poetry of Displacement
Preview Michelle Tea
At McSweeney’s, preview Michelle Tea’s Castle on the River Vistula, the final installment of her Chelsea trilogy. You could also check out our piece on contemporary YA fiction and talk therapy.
A Review in Comics
Book reviews are great and all, but even we sometimes feel they’re missing something. Enter Kevin Thomas, whose HORN! illustrated reviews for The Rumpus are beautiful and informative in under 9 panels. Compare his pieces on Roxane Gay‘s An Untamed State or Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams to our reviews here and here, and be sure to check out the just-published HORN! The Collected Reviews.
Knausgaard: Horror and Delight
The third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s My Struggle was released on Tuesday. In a recent review for The Daily Beast, Ted Gioia argues that “we read [My Struggle] with horror and delight, because the protagonist—who is Karl Ove Knausgaard himself—is determined to reveal every embarrassing and shameful detail of his past life. Imagine a literary novel with grand Proustian ambitions, but combined with the ethos of those creepy Jackass-type reality shows in which contestants get a dose of renown by making fools of themselves. That’s the spirit of My Struggle.” For a second opinion, be sure to check out our own review of the novel’s earlier installments.
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Magical Journalism
“But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it ‘stunning,’ Susan Sontag hosted him at dinner parties. Gabriel Garcia Marquez dubbed him, simply, ‘the Master’ – high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up Garcia Marquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.” Ryszard Kapuściński: novelist? Journalist? Or something else entirely?
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Sasha’s Favorite Albums
Sasha Frere-Jones, who you may know from his work at The New Yorker, has listed his favorite albums of 2011, and even put together a Spotify playlist of some of his favorite singles. Isn’t that nice of him?
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Unread Books
Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, cops to a list of classic books he’s never read. Among them: Jane Eyre, Blood Meridian, and Millions Hall-of-Famer Stoner.
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Top 3 Reasons Why You Need to Read Mark O’Connell’s Latest
1. The listicle is “the house style of a distracted culture.”
2. Our own Mark O’Connell writes about the ubiquitous form for The New Yorker.
3. And fittingly, he writes about it in a list.
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Something Cannibalistic
“When it comes to the personal essay, we want so much and there is something cannibalistic about our desire. We want essayists to splay themselves bare. We want to see how much they are willing to bleed for us. This desire introduces an interesting tension for essay writers. How much should they bleed, and how much blood should they save for themselves?” Roxane Gay reviews Meghan Daum‘s The Unspeakable and reflects on the personal essay for The New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s Millions review of the same book.
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