Damian Lewis is going from being a traitor of a country to running one. He will star as Henry VIII in the BBC’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Mark Rylance will play Thomas Cromwell (though previously he’s played another role in the court, Sir Thomas Boleyn.)
All Hail King Brody
What Kind
At Boston Review, check out a new poem from Maggie Nelson. At The Millions, Leslie Jamison includes Nelson’s Bluets and The Art of Cruelty in A Year in Reading.
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DJ Eldest Immigrant Daughter
“The first boy to kiss your mother later raped women / when the war broke out. She remembers hearing this / from your uncle, then going to your bedroom and lying down on the floor. You were at school.” The poetry of Warsan Shire, Young Poet Laureate of London, does not mess around.
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A GIF Search Engine
Last weekend marked the debut of Giphy, a new search engine for animated GIFs. Of course, I’m not willing to give a verdict on its utility just yet – the database doesn’t seem to list my three favorite GIFs of all time: therapist lion, slow motion corgis, and Kermit meets Christian.
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week’s New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in “activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting.”
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Support Indie Publishers
Recommended Reading: Nathan Scott McNamara writes for The Atlantic on why we need indie publishers. “Eighty percent of U.S. books are produced by the Big Five publishers, but with each passing year—and with a stable small number of annual releases—independent presses are earning more of the literary conversation, gaining frequent articles and reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and more.” You could also read Rebecca J. Novelli’s thoughts on Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher.
My hangovers are scheduled a year in advance.
John Waters on parents, aging, routine, gangsta rap, and WikiLeaks.