“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
Iowa’s Free Online Poetry Workshop
A new MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is scheduled to begin on June 28. “How Writers Write Poetry” is free and open to the public, and it will feature craft talks from poets such as Robert Hass and Kwame Dawes. A fiction-writing course is also scheduled for September. (Related: Read how several Iowa MFA students describe a typical day in the program.)
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Race, Decolonial Love, and Junot Díaz
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I Mean, Why Not?
Two minutes of gorgeous West Indian manatee footage, and you'd better believe I'm linking to it.
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First Printings Get Smaller
PW points out yet another publishing industry totem being torn down by the rise of e-books, the first printing number, once a signifier of how "big" publishers and the media expected a book to be: "In an era when first printings are down because e-books can account for as much as 50% of sales on frontlist titles, the term 'first printing' sounds more and more out of place."
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“When it gets loudly, IT GETS VERY LOUD INDEED”
Have you Yanks seen BBC's 6-episode series cum feature film The Trip? If not, your interest will be piqued by this clip of the show's main characters doing their best Michael Caine impressions. It's on Netflix if you're into laughter, merriment, and that sort of thing.
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The Last Sports Bar
With the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs for the second year in a row, our own Bill Morris takes to the pages of the New York Times to remember the legendary Detroit bar the Lindell A.C., where sports stars rubbed elbows with the fans.
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Jeremy McCarter on James Baldwin’s New Anthology
At Newsweek, Jeremy McCarter reviews The Cross of Redemption, a new anthology of James Baldwin’s previously uncollected essays and public letters: “At a time when serious people claim we live in a 'post-racial' society, the reappearance of Baldwin’s writing—insistent, accusatory, outraged—feels like a terrible family secret coming to light in an Ibsen play, or Banquo’s ghost showing up to spoil the party.”