Having grown up in Russia, New Republic senior editor Julia Ioffe is in a uniquely good position to cover the Sochi Olympics, which is why she’s writing regular dispatches from this year’s Winter Games. On Saturday, she published a piece about one of the sadder (yet more predictable) developments of the Games: foreign journalists are bombarding gay residents of Sochi with questions and requests for interviews. (She’s also manning the magazine’s Instagram feed.)
No Comment
From Well-Read to Well-Written
Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community celebrating “the uniqueness of Black literature & sisterhood,” has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its inaugural writers’ conference and festival. Past WRBG book club guests include Year in Reading alums Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Flournoy, whom we also interviewed about her debut novel The Turner House.
●
●
Songs of Zora
Recommended Listening: Florida Memory’s great collection of Zora Neale Hurston singing.
The Middlesteins On a Budget
You can treat yourself to The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg for the low price of $2.99. As readers of the book will find out: it’s hard to resist treats…
The Miserable Wonderfulness of M. Houellebecq
The second issue of Chicago’s crackerjack The Point, having thrown caution to the wind, tackles the prickly genius of Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq has published four novels, all of them bitter and miserable.”
●
●
Trolling with Amanda Palmer
Art is about connecting the dots, Amanda Palmer proposed in her keynote address on creativity and sharing art in the internet age at the 2013 Grub Muse Literary Conference earlier this month. “For every bridge you build together with your community of readers, there’s a new set of trolls who sit underneath it,” she said about the internet.
●
●
Reading Rainbow returns!
LeVar Burton is relaunching Reading Rainbow! Though in a new form: the show that aired on PBS for 26 years will be available as an iPad app, which you can preview at engadget.
●
●
…And If You Still Want More on The Pale King
I can’t recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s 7,000-word article on The Pale King highly enough – not because he gets everything right, but because it’s what long-form writing about books should look like: passionate, lucid, wide-ranging, and awfully fun to read. I salute GQ for running it, and hope to see more literary coverage there in the future.
●
●
World Book Night
A committee headed by the author Tracy Chevalier this week unveiled the lineup of twenty-five specially printed titles which will be distributed by thousands of volunteers across the UK on April 23, 2012 as part of an international celebration of reading.
●
●