Millions staffer Mark O’Connell recently took a look at Édouard Levé’s Works. “For the most part, it’s a catalogue of unrealized creativity,” he writes. “Which in the very extensiveness of its cataloging becomes a monstrous paradox of realized creativity.” (Related: O’Connell previously reviewed Levé’s Suicide and Autoportrait for our site.)
Édouard Levé’s “Monstrous Paradox.”
What’s the difference between Literary and Genre?
At Well-Read Donkey, Dan Chaon writes about his literary roots.
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Table 4 2014
The Table 4 Writers Foundation was founded in memory of Elaine Kaufman, a larger-than-life literary personality and hostess who supported NYC writers at her restaurant for many years, and awards grants to promising writers for unpublished work. The 2014 winners have just been released, and their prizewinning work can be read online. There will also be a gala in honor of the winners on April 30 in NYC, and tickets can be purchased here.
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Books of a Southern Capital
As part of their efforts to explore new literary locales, the bloggers at Ploughshares took on Richmond, perhaps the only city to claim Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, and GWAR.
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The Other Bill of Rights
“I can read whatever I want. No one can stop me. I can help other people read what they want. And no one can stop them.” Zoe Fisher for The Rumpus about being “a horny queer teenager” who found her home in libraries. Pair with a controversial piece from our own pages this week by Douglas Koziol, a bookseller exploring what to do with “a book that you not only find objectionable but also believe actually dangerous in the lessons it portends amidst such a politically precarious time?”
Decadence and Poetry
“To say that late Victorian poetry is bleak would be akin to remarking that Wilkie Collins had a decent knack for plotting a novel. These poems are freighted with Gothic overtones, and it is not uncommon for some supernatural phenomenon to intrude upon what had started out as a seemingly harmless quatrain. We often encounter Death himself—or the Devil—who is something of a literary celebrity for the decadent poets. But what marks the best of these poems is that the outré is in service to something that we can think of as more desperate, and, wouldn’t you know, human.” Over at The Boston Review, an online-only essay looking at the peculiarities of Victorian decadent poetry.
Ecstasy/Despair
Shouldn’t you be busy writing? Here’s an illustrated guide to some of the common anxieties many of us feel when we’re not writing.