Recommended Reading: The Oxford American just unlocked David Ramsey’s 2008 piece on “How Lil Wayne helped me survive my first year teaching in New Orleans.”
Born in New Orleans, raised in New Orleans
Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
So does literature really have the power to bring liberals and conservatives together? Probably not. Either way, this is still a fascinating study: “The ‘most startling result was this: it was conservative — not liberal — readers who are most active in producing this space of cultural compromise.’ Basically, within this sample size, conservative readers tended to exude more generous praise for ‘bridge books’ and did so with a vernacular considered to be ‘less heated or emotional.’ Grammatically, they also expressed ‘more complex thoughts.'”
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Don DeLillo’s Secret (Seventh) Book
Don DeLillo’s seventh book was his first big hit, but you’d never know it from looking at the work’s cover or title page. That’s because he wrote Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League under the pseudonym, Cleo Birdwell. (Bonus: DeLillo’s 2009 story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” was released from the New Yorker archive this week.)
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Colum McCann Reads
Listen to National Book Award winner Colum McCann read from Let The Great World Spin and discuss his prize-winning novel with Wellesley’s “reggae novelist” Colin Channer.
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Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
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Working Title: Trimalchio
Dustin Illingworth writes for Lit Hub about the origins of great book titles. Also check out Janet Potter’s Millions guide to finding the perfect title for that book in your drawer.
How To: Write Difference
“Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes?” Roxane Gay reviews Joyce Carol Oates‘s The Sacrifice and simultaneously explains how to write difference well. Hint: it “demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent.”
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