“I’m sure the ghost is fascinated by the N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. debate, and would add that there’s a literary-world bias… toward writing done by the living.” The New Yorker interviews Rebecca Curtis about ghost stories and her latest piece of short fiction, “The Pink House.” For more about Curtis, check out our review of her debut collection Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money.
N.Y.C. vs. M.F.A. vs. R.I.P.
Walt Whitman: Bottled and Brewed
Bell's Brewery, in Kalamazoo Mich., is set to release a series of seven beers in tribute to Walt Whitman's famous poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
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Bad Review Bingo
Print out your playing cards and start sifting through the comment sections of negative book reviews. It’s a new game called “bad review bingo.” (inspired in part by the frothy commenters to our own Janet Potter’s blistering review of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.)
Sonya Chung Reading at Long Island University
I’ll be reading at Long Island University in Brooklyn on Monday, April 4th at 12 noon, with Gary Shteyngart. I have no idea what I’ll be reading – possibly something new, or something very old.
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Get Inspired
Cristine Brache curated a great list of web-poetry videos for last month’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, and she was awesome enough to post the entire playlist online for all to see.
New DeLillo
Some exciting news for Don DeLillio fans. His first ever collection of short stories is coming out in November, The Angel Esmeralda. The stories were written between 1979 and 2011, and the title story appeared in Esquire in May 1994.
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Very Brief Respites from the Darkness
Want to learn filmmaking from a self-proclaimed “soldier of cinema”? Then sign up for a class with Werner Herzog. The enigmatic director, whose films include Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo, announced he’ll be teaching a course in the summer through the online provider Masterclass.
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National Literary Ambassadors in the New York Times
The New York Times interviews Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States for National Poetry Month. They discuss black history, bringing poetry to the central and rural parts of the country and to those who are incarcerated and why poetry isn’t as popular among adults. “Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry — and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.” It’s a delight, happy Saturday!
Tana French on the Celtic Tiger
Tana French pegs the cause of Ireland’s financial crisis on “a total disconnect between action and consequence.” For many Irish citizens since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, she writes, “their whole sense of a world governed by coherent cause and effect, of their ability to have any agency in their own lives, came under attack.” Bonus: our own Edan Lepucki has previously written about French’s novels and plotting.
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