Here’s a wonderful way to spend 77 minutes: the NYPL posted the entire video of a conversation between Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Behind the Beautiful Forevers author Katherine Boo.
“It’s the people that keep you going back”
The Odyssey, Mapped
An interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer tracks the winding, often circuitous journey taken by Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
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Getting Graphic
Hyperallergic has excerpts from Rokudenashiko’s graphic memoir What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, which Michael Melgaard recently reviewed at The Millions.
Read Volt
The Barcelona Review has the text of the eponymous story from Alan Heathcock’s Volt for your reading pleasure. You might remember Heathcock’s work from last Decemeber, when Michael Schaub picked the “dark, beautiful short story collection” in his Year in Reading installment, and then gave it a glowing review for NPR.
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Pablo Neruda’s Body to be Exhumed
In 2011 I wrote about a group of Chilean Communists who wished to exhume Pablo Neruda’s body. They alleged that Neruda was murdered. Now, two years later, a judge has ordered the corpse to be exhumed and autopsied in order to set the record straight.
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No Phonies Here
“Salinger’s Holden Caulfield made a distinction between writers you would like to call on the phone and those you wouldn’t care to talk to at all. Teju Cole belongs to the former group.” Year in Reading alum Aleksandar Hemon interviews Teju Cole. If you can’t get enough of Cole, we interviewed him, too.
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New from Beatrix Potter
A new story from Beatrix Potter will be published this September. A publisher discovered the almost-finished story, which features a cat in boots named Miss Catherine St Quintin, at the Victoria and Albert Museum archives. For a humorous take on modern children’s books, check out our own Jacob Lambert’s series Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?
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Literary Friendships
Emily Smith writes on literary friendships throughout history at Ploughshares.
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E.M. Forster’s Prescient Sci-Fi Story
Gabrielle Bellot examines "The Machine Stops," the sole science-fiction story by E.M. Forster, which contains eerie echos of today's socially distanced world.
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