“but for now it’s dust in our teeth”

In September of 2013, Paula Meehan was appointed Ireland’s Professor of Poetry, and the transcript from her first lecture is available online [PDF]. You can learn more about Meehan in her interview with the Wake Forest University Press, and you can check out a video of one her readings over here.

Millions staffer Mark O’Connell recently took a look at Édouard Levé’s Works. “For the most part, it’s a catalogue of unrealized creativity,” he writes. “Which in the very extensiveness of its cataloging becomes a monstrous paradox of realized creativity.” (Related: O’Connell previously reviewed Levé’s Suicide and Autoportrait for our site.)

A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet's HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin's memoir Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel.

Ebook purveyor Byliner continues its foray into fiction with a new story by Margaret Atwood: "I'm Starved for You" (Here's an excerpt)

William Stuntz's book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice investigates "how, over the past 50 years, our criminal justice system had been transformed into an unfair, amoral bureaucracy--one that had given up on the very idea of justice." Its genesis is worth reading about. So, too, is this related article in the most recent edition of n+1, "Raise the Crime Rate."