A new anthology celebrates poetry “that moves men to tears,” and it includes the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. Meanwhile, for BBC Newsnight, Clive James gets choked up while reading Keith Douglas’s “Canoe.”
Men Crying Over Poetry
Tuesday New Release Day: Phillips, Tillman, Bender
Probably the biggest literary debut the week is Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur, a faux memoir about the surfacing of a long-lost Shakespeare play. Also out this week is the first book from former Soft Skull head Richard Nash's new venture Red Lemonade: Lynne Tillman's Someday This Will Be Funny. And, finally, now out in paperback is Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. (Our two reviews)
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Foul Swine
Somehow we knew that Gary Shteyngart had a pretty interesting childhood. As Andy Borowitz explains in a review of Little Failure, the author’s new memoir, the elder Shteyngart regaled his son with “outlandish” stories, most notably “a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork.” You can learn what the author likes to read today in his Year in Reading piece.
Don’t Assume
"I asked myself - why don’t I state the race of my characters? And am I doing something wrong by not explicitly including a diverse cast of characters? Could I be doing something better? The short answer is yes." An argument in favor of race bent fanfiction and resisting assumedly white characters from The Missouri Review blog.
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All Told
You might have heard that a new Shirley Jackson book appeared on shelves this week. A collection of previously unpublished work, Let Me Tell You was published by Penguin Random House, which happens to be the place where Benjamin Dreyer, a lifelong Shirley Jackson fan, works as a copy chief and managing editor. At The Toast, he describes how it felt to edit his favorite writer.
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46 Women’s Plays
The Kilroys, a group of leaders in American theater, has put together a list of 46 plays by emerging women playwrights that they think deserve to produced (only 10.5% of Broadway plays are written by women). That list is a brilliant resource to promote diversity in dramatic literature--but now we want to read all the unpublished plays on it.
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Reading The Orient Express
The Orient Express began service on this day in 1883—Paris to Istanbul in 83.5 hours. Agatha Christie may be the most famous writer to have capitalized on the train's romantic allure, but the list of books begins decades before her (Dracula, for example) and goes for decades after.
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