Over at Electric Literature, Tara Isabella Burton likens the experience of reading her ex’s favorite book – in this case Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity – to “rifling through someone’s letters after a death.”
“To do so, I felt, would be too dangerous”
You Can’t Go Home Again
“When I go back to Bogotá, I like to share my knowledge of the car bombs that went off in the city in the ’80s and ’90s. I helpfully point out the gory details to cab drivers and friends. I press my finger on the window and point at corners, ‘That’s the spot where an ATM blew up, seven dead.’” From Bogatá to Tel Aviv — here are ten writers on the places they immigrated from, returned to, remember, and call home.
The Summer People
Over at Longreads, Carrie Frye writes on the homonymous short stories of Shirley Jackson and Year in Reading alumna Kelly Link. Also check out this Millions interview with Link.
Two Takes on Red Doc>
If you enjoyed the profile of Anne Carson in the latest New York Times Magazine – fictitious “ice bats” notwithstanding – you’re going to really love Parul Sehgal and Nathan Huffstutter’s two takes on Red Doc>. The work, Sehgal writes, is “suspended between what it is and what we want it to be.” And also, writes Huffstutter, it’s a work that “courses with a wit shot through with intelligence and humility.”
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“so this is the sound of you”
Why not kick off 2012 with former poet laureate W. S. Merwin’s poem, “To the New Year“?
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Zen State
Recommended Reading: Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’s poem “To Get to Zen” at Paper Darts. “you must first lose your/shit in an elevator/in front of a man you do not know.”
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The PhD Pyramid Scheme
The Economist has a pretty damning look at the global state of academia, particularly as it pertains to the enormous numbers of PhDs being churned out, the cheap labor they represent, and the comparatively few full professorship gigs available to them.