“This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on.” John Jeremiah Sullivan investigates more mysterious musicians in The New York Times Magazine. Bonus: You can listen to their music as you read. For more of Sullivan’s music journalism, read his piece on the origins of ska.
Searching for Geeshie and Elvie
The Best Books in Translation
Open Letter Books director Chad Post teamed up with Green Apple Books buyer Stephen Sparks to make a list of their twenty favorite books in translation. Among their selections is László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which Adam Levy reviewed for us last year, and which Post and Sparks describe as “a diabolical, haunting deconstruction of apocalyptic messianism.”
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Overhearing the Wisdom
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with John Murillo about duende and the ethics of writing poetry.
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The Lost Books
Over at NPR, Parul Sehgal recommends five books “that have been restored to us, that have been reissued, reimagined or — in one instance — presumed lost and discovered for the first time.”
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Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens
Here’s a video of Bill Murray reading two poems by Wallace Stevens. (As if you needed further evidence that Murray is a national treasure.)
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A First for The Second Pass
The Second Pass marks its first anniversary with a bunch of writers championing their favorite out-of-print books. Happy Anniversary! (For more out-of-print recommendations see our collection of gems from last year.)
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Or, Like Something Out of Kafka
In their latest Trend Watch, Merriam-Webster announced they’ve been seeing more searches for “Kafkaesque,” a spike they attribute to British publishers writing about Booker winner Han Kang. Since the word is so overused, it’s worthwhile to ask: just what does it actually mean now, anyway? Allison Flood tries to pin it down at The Guardian.
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Git Yer Free E-Books Here
Free e-book bibliophiles rejoice, you now have yet another place to download public domain e-books. The Digital Reader reports on Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-based project to “produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks.” Pair with our post from a decade back about Project Gutenberg’s pubbing of “2 B R 0 2 B,” a “lost” story by Kurt Vonnegut.
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