As if it wasn’t tough enough for a book reviewer to get page space, now they’ve got to compete with Rob Lowe, Al Gore, and the silent half of Penn & Teller. Thanks, Grey Lady.
Celebrity Book Reviews: On the Rise?
Fractal Surfaces
Recommended Reading: On Marianne Moore’s infectious devotion to all things small, and how that same devotion helped make her Observations one of the great verbal works of art of the 20th century.
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Drawing the Line
Recommended Reading: On the dark, subversive adult coloring books of the 60s.
Fiction Contest at Columbia
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art has a fiction, nonfiction and poetry contest going on that pays $500 to first prize winners. Joshua Ferris is judging the fiction entries. Deadline is 1/1/2010.
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Poetry Is Politics, Politics Is Poetry
Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, “The white students aren’t being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop.”
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Best Title or Best Title?
According to the New York Times, a “vigilante copy editor” has hit the sculpture park of the Pratt Institute.
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ICYMI
“People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders.” Year in Reading alum Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, speaks to The Guardian about gender, family, and her personal life.
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After the Wall
“[Christa] Wolf was a committed dissident in the GDR (East Germany) and a forceful voice resisting Western triumphalism after reunification. It would seem like some sort of explanation was owed to the public. Yet how does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past, to the psychological and cultural backdrop of such fateful decisions, is not even subjectively available?” On City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.