Recommended Reading: In an essay for Poetry, Siobhan Phillips explores an “old connection” – the tie between sleep and poetry – using Lyn Hejinian’s Book of a Thousand Eyes as a compass.
“Sleep is strange”
Tastemaker
How do you make the jump from editing a food magazine to writing novels? It’s a tricky change to make, but Ruth Reichl did it, as she explains to Marnie Hanel in an interview in the Times. (Her first novel came out last week.)
●
●
December Stories
Recommended Reading: The fall issue of December is out, featuring works by Grace Cavalieri, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Marge Piercy, and our own Michael Bourne.
iLRB
Well, there goes your Sunday. The London Review of Books has uploaded a whole batch of podcasts to iTunes. And they’re free!
●
●
Barrels of Laughs
A while back, our own Mark O’Connell argued that Flann O’Brien, in The Poor Mouth, was the funniest writer who ever lived. Now, in an essay, Erin Somersin says the title should go to Mordecai Richler instead. She writes about the Canadian author’s unique sense of humor in a piece for the Ploughshares blog.
“The New York Times, the paper of record, had written a fictitious character to verify a fact.”
Patrick Somerville’s latest novel, This Bright River, was recently reviewed in The New York Times by Janet Maslin, who found the book to be, among other things, “soggy.” Unfortunately, some of her critique was based on a mistaken reading of Somerville’s work. I’ll let Patrick take it from here.
●
●