Staking Out the Best Real Estate
JJS on Seidel
“Seidel scared himself with poetry, and us too. How had he done it?” John Jeremiah Sullivan presented the Hadada Award to Frederick Seidel at The Paris Review’s Spring Revel last month. You can read the full text of his speech and three of Seidel’s poems. This seems to be a much better week for Sullivan because he also just won the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his essay “I Placed a Jar in Tennessee.”
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Be Mine
Yesterday, one of my Curiosities included a link to an old Millions review of AM Homes’s domestically disturbing novel May We Be Forgiven. Today, she has a great new story over at The Guardian just in time for Valentine’s Day.
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New Dyer Book
Word of a new book from Millions fave Geoff Dyer has just emerged. (Edit: new in the U.S.; it’s been published previously in the U.K.) The Missing of the Somme, due in August, is a “meditation on World War I.”
The Future United States of America
In Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams's new anthology, they gather a group of writers to imagine the country's future using speculative fiction.
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Our Lucrative Profession
The folks at Harper’s Bazaar (not Harper’s Magazine) are launching a new short story competition, and the grand prize is wild: an all-expenses-paid weeklong stay on a private Scottish island, publication in the May 2014 issue of the magazine and a first-edition book from the Asprey’s Fine and Rare Books Department, worth up to £3,000. (And yes, that’s pounds, not dollars.)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Levine; Birch; Wieringa; Boland; Plumly
Out this week: My Lost Poets by Philip Levine; Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch; These Are the Names by Tommy Wieringa; A Poet’s Dublin by Eavan Boland; and Against Sunset by Stanley Plumly. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.