A year and a half later, Jessie Gaynor returns to The Paris Review to follow up her much-appreciated “Drunk Texts From Famous Authors” series. (Part one is here.) On tap this time: T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Blake, and a Flarf poet.
Drunk Texts From Famous Authors (Part II)
Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville
While reviewing Alfred Kazin‘s Journals, Christopher Byrd pays a visit to Brownsville and Kazin’s boyhood home.
●
●
Emily Dickinson, Harvard-Bound
Seth Perlow examines how Harvard claims the rights to Emily Dickinson's poems, a body of work that was unpublished when she died, more than 130 years ago.
●
●
●
●
●
The Beautiful Shame
Recommended Viewing: As this year’s World Cup heats up, take a look at what may lie ahead. E:60’s piece on the shameful set-up for Qatar’s 2022 tournament should be an eye-opener in a lot of ways.
Colson Whitehead’s Two Types of Books
“There’s only two kinds of books, shit you like, and shit you don’t like," Colson Whitehead told the crowd in his lively AWP Keynote.
●
●
●
BLM, the Novel
“Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do,” he said. “Keep your hands visible. Don’t make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you.” Read an excerpt from the Black Lives Matter–inspired YA novel The Hate U Give by A. C. Thomas, scheduled for release next June. See also some of our favorite writers on their favorite political writing, or our review of Nate Marshall’s poetry collection, Wild Hundreds, which critic Emmanuel N. Adolf Alzuphar called “the foremost articulation of contemporary blackness’s dynamism in literature.”
●
●
On Death and Crows
Max Porter’s Death Is the Thing With Feathers is a bizarre, beautiful book. Over at The Literary Hub, he talks death, writing, and musical theater with Catherine Lacey. Porter’s book came highly recommended by Garth Risk Hallberg in his 2015 Year in Reading for The Millions.
●
●
On Walls and Compassion
“You know I would like to talk with you and lessen your fears. Regardless of our differences, we are related.” New short fiction from Dutch novelist Claire Polders over at Electric Literature. Related: some wonderfully weird Trump metafiction.