Recommended Viewing: Poet and professor Campbell McGrath reads some of his work for Miami’s recent TEDxCoconutGrove event.
“Poetry is like fudge.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Krauss; Szabó; Yamashita; Locke; Hasbún; Rowe; Olukotun; Ng
Out this week: Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss; Katalin Street by Magda Szabó; Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita; Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke; Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún; A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe; After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun; and Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Patron-Driven Acquisition
Librarians might frown on P.D.A. in the library, that is, Public Displays of Affection by canoodling college couples. But another kind of P.D.A. might bring a different, more welcome sort of disruption to the library: Patron-Driven Acquisition, a model of e-book licensing that aims to relieve library purchasing agents from spending thousands on books nobody will end up reading.
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Live Long
When your father shows you The Wrath of Khan at a young age, you develop an appreciation for the late Leonard Nimoy, whose death scene as Spock in that film is among his most famous performances. For Jen Girdish, that appreciation led to this essay, which reflects on Nimoy, her father’s own death and the onetime ubiquity of VHS tapes.
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Seeing Beyond the Story
“When she began the cancer memoir, it was the fact of the writing, more than what was to be written, that mattered.” On Jenny Diski’s way of seeing beyond the story.
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Modern Canterbury Tales
If Chaucer lived today, The Canterbury Tales might look a little bit like this.
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My Ironic Valentine
Regardless of your Valentine's Day plans, do not take advice from Nate Piven, the protagonist of Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Ron Charles asked Waldman to write another scene of Nate's romantic saga. "He decided it would be best to hedge his bets by getting her something 'ironic.'"
An Imagined Country
"The immigrant who arrives too late in life to adapt to his new country, but too early to survive on nostalgia for the old country, has to create a third, imagined country to live in." Peter Pomerantsev writes for the London Review of Books about Brighton Beach, Russian immigrants and a "self-made America." Pair with Matthew Wolfson's review of Yelena Akhtiorskaya's novel of Brighton Beach and Odessa, Panic in a Suitcase.
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