Aimee Bender, Year in Reading alum and author of, most recently, The Color Master, writes for The New York Times about the structural genius of Goodnight Moon: “[The story] does two things right away: It sets up a world and then it subverts its own rules even as it follows them.”
What We Can Learn from Goodnight Moon
Goodbye, Gourmet
If the idea of Rachael Ray as queen of the food world shivers your timbers, read no further: Gourmet magazine, until now stewarded by the excellent Ruth Reichl, will cease publication with the November issue, the NY Times reports. Condé Nast also gave the axe to Cookie, Elegant Bride, and Modern Bride. The print media mass grave fills apace…
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NYRB Classics Winter Sale
Winter officially ends on March 19th, but you can take advantage of the NYRB Classics “Winter Sale” until March 25th. With 50% discounts on 65 books, your tax refund check might’ve just written itself off.
This Is Not Confessional Poetry
Over at the Bennington Review, Michael Dumanis interviews Year in Reading alumna Dorothea Lasky about persona poetry, the first-person “I,” and creativity. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on creativity and madness.
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Dispatches from Down Under
“With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea,” our own Michael Bourne writes in his Dispatches column at The Common, “Stanley Street.”
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Read, Watch, Binge
As a part of their Read, Watch, Binge! summer series, NPR recommends TV series, movies, books, and more based on 60 of their readers favorite books. If you’re looking for more books, check out our Great Second-Half Fiction Preview.
Ghostwriter
The Swiss foundation Anne Frank Fonds is attempting to extend the copyright of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl by crediting Anne’s father as a co-author — even though Otto Frank writes in the prologue to the first edition that the book mostly contains Anne’s words.
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The Eternal Struggle
“I bet you can relate. Always another crisis, always more costs to keep down. It’s hard to find time for yourself, you know? But the president of the United States should be able to read a book when he wants to. Or at least look at one. Maybe I could just look at this book for a while.”
A Note from the Author
It was probably inevitable that Rap Genius would spawn Poetry Genius, but it was not so inevitable that Junot Díaz would make an appearance on the latter. On Saturday, Díaz annotated a number of passages from his own The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, including a footnote where he says he went “buckwild.”
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