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”
A Hypothetical Country
You never need an excuse to read new words written by Edwidge Danticat, but in case you did, here's an excerpt from her introduction to the forthcoming edition of James Baldwin's classic, semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It On A Mountain.
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Ideology: An Introduction
For the theory-obsessed, soon-to-be liberal arts graduate on your list: the essential Verso Books undergraduate reading list.
No, I Matter Less!
To celebrate the release of Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, the Cabinet editors put their own magazine on trial, filling up an NYPL auditorium with academics and writers who, perhaps inevitably, began to compete in a kind of irrelevance-off. Which begs the question, answered well by The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones in Bookforum: how relevant to the wider culture is a magazine like Cabinet, anyway?
Recommended Single Sentence Animation
You may have heard us mention Electric Literature's Recommended Reading project recently. It's a great new venture in which short stories are selected by other prominent writers -- and it's recently surpassed its fundraising goal. Now, they've even combined the project with one of their most beloved classics: Single Sentence Animation. Check out this little ditty to accompany Ben Marcus's "Watching Mysteries With My Mother" and, of course, check out their Kickstarter page.
Someone You’re Not
We're all frauds on the internet! Ann Leary at The Literary Hub takes a look at why online relationships tend to falter in the "real world." Here are a couple of complementary friendship-related essays from The Millions.
Grindr’s Poet in Residence
"Starting next week, I will be the gay social networking app Grindr’s first poet in residence," writes Max Wallis, author of Modern Love.
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Prodigious by Design
Sometimes, when you read a lot of work by a single writer, you end up writing unconscious imitations of their work. The reliability of this effect raises an ourobouric possibility: what if you reviewed a writer’s fiction in their own style? At The Awl, Sarah Marian Seltzer reviews Henry James as Henry James. You could also read Charles-Adam Foster-Simard on binge-reading James’s fiction.
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63 years and 1 day
The Catcher in the Rye is 63 years and 1 day old today and PBS has published an infographic tracing the novel's complicated route to publication. Pair with Millions essays about rereading Salinger and his three leaked stories.