This week brought news that NOX, Antigonick, and Red Doc> author Anne Carson is headed to Annandale-on-Hudson to become Bard College’s “Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence.” Carson’s praise has been sung far and wide on The Millions, and even earned admiration from a pair of Janes: both Alison and Hirshfield.
Bard’s Bard
What Katy Meant
Recommended Reading: Lindsay Palka's essay on the children's book What Katy Did.
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Picturing Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was one of the first people to use photography to control meaning. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American catalogues his many portraits and how they contributed to our perception of Douglass. Our own Edan Lepucki writes about the place of slave narratives in fiction.
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Capitalism Is Not About Equality
Check out this interview with Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. “Capitalism, ultimately, it’s not about equality, it’s not about social justice. It doesn’t care about fixing fundamentally unequal systems that impact humans on an everyday level. Critical thinking is the really important skill, to [ask], does it seem like this is a company or a brand that really cares about women?” Our own Edan Lepucki’s piece on feminist anthems complements the interview nicely.
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Williams Reads “Stuff”
Recommended Listening: Joy Williams reads her story “Stuff” from The New Yorker’s July 25th issue.
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From Abkhazia to Zimbabwe
"[W]e can confirm that there is no place on Earth (not even Antarctica) that literature isn’t written." Michael Barron, the U.S. literary editor for Culture Trip, curates "The Global Anthology," an online project showcasing more than 220 pieces of literature from all over the world written in or translated into English (via Moby Lives).
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Mistakes Happen
In 1864, Herman Melville was asked to submit a poem to a collection intended to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission - and he sent the wrong one.
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