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
“There are myriad roles for poets”
The Academy of American Poets is conducting six-question interviews with six different poets in anticipation of the 2012 Poets Forum (October 18-20). Over at BOMB, you can read the first installment, which features Mary Jo Bang.
●
●
New Joan Didion Memoir
Joan Didion has finished work on a new memoir about aging. It is to be titled Blue Nights and will be published by Knopf in 2011.
“Cleaves closely to the forms of realism”
“Through such experiments, [he] seems preoccupied by the need to make this familiar form something different from what we think it is, so that it can more capably capture a reality that has fast been veering into the unreal. It’s not just that the world outside the novel has made this jump, but also that we cannot evade the world’s strangeness when the storytellers, and the characters into which they breathe life, increasingly come from such different perspectives.” On Year in Reading alum Chang-rae Lee’s new novel (which you can buy with a nifty 3D book cover).
Graphic Pains
Over at Public Books, Jared Gardner explores the theme of pain and illness at the heart of many graphic narratives. As he explains it, “Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961).” Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions piece on the history of Marvel Comics.
●
●
Booker Prize Shortlist Odds
With the Booker Prize shortlist out, the bookies have updated the odds. Tom McCarthy’s C emerges as the new favorite and Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are surprising long shots.
Problem Solving
●
●