Recommended Reading: Amit Majmudar on Virgil’s The Aeneid.
Addenda
The Tournament of Books is Underway!
Yesterday, Searching for John Hughes author Jason Diamond kicked off this year’s Tournament of Books by judging the “play-in round.” Today, our own Kirstin Butler is deliberating between The Underground Railroad and Black Wave.
The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
“Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that’s not right. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I’m your president.”
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Catalog Upon Catalog
LibraryThing has published the catalog of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal library. You can check out a list of all 322 titles here (PDF). Meanwhile, from the department of “new books you can actually buy,” New Directions has published their Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 catalog (PDF) as well.
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On the Limitations of Language
Over at The Point, Spencer McAvoy writes about the language and vision of Joy Williams, a writer who “instead of drawing boundaries between us and whatever Other, posits language as an experience of self-limitedness.” Williams’s new collection of short stories, The Visiting Privilege, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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Writing the Body
Recommended Reading: E.V. de Cleyre explores the presence of the body in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.
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RIP Seamus Heaney
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney passed away this morning. Here are some of our favorites from the Irish poet: his original poem “Oysters,” a reading of his translation of Beowulf, and his views on Ireland’s politics.
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