All month long, The Paris Review and McSweeney’s are offering a special dual deal in which you can order year-long subscriptions to both magazines for 20% off of their individual rates.
The Paris Review and McSweeney’s Collaborate on a Dual Deal
Delicious Reads
Attention Los Angeles-based readers and eaters! On Tuesday evening, June 29, 2010, Michelle Huneven and Samantha Peale will be at Canele in Atwater Village to celebrate the paperback releases of their latest novels (Blame and The American Painter, Emma Dial, respectively.) Food from the books will be served--the 3-course dinner is only $34. Skylight will be selling the books.
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The Modern Memoir
Recommended Reading: On the memoir, “the offspring of the slave narrative,” as a literary form from the Black tradition. Recent examples range from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margo Jefferson to Clifford Thompson and Rosemarie Freeney.
Robot Virginia Woolf?
You must obey (and read) your robot overlords! As if winning a literary award wasn't already hard enough, a story co-authored by computers just made it through at least one round of judging at the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award competition in Japan. But don't worry, you haven't lost your job quite yet–the good news is that the programs still have "some problems … such as character descriptions.”
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Letters to a Young Girl
Linda Chavers pens an important letter to black girls everywhere. She writes, “I am giving you the prologue. You must go forward accepting and understanding that no one will ever do it as well as you do, and no one will ever tell you that you do it better than anybody else.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s list of books that “shed light on the history and evolution of racism in America.”
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Forgetting Poetry
We all probably had the humiliating experience of reciting a poem in high school. Yet at Salon, Nina Kang believes that memorizing poetry is a lost art. She blames the loss of the discipline on our tendency to skim and new poetry's seeming aversion to memorization. "Writers actively fight against the appearance of artifice, and often instead strive for an informal, offhand tone, with that hint of clumsiness that lends a certain authenticity to the voice. It turns out this is a quality that makes the reciter’s job that much more difficulty." Here's our take on the lost art of recitation.
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