“A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment”

Recommended Reading: In an essay for Poetry, Siobhan Phillips explores an “old connection” – the tie between sleep and poetry – using Lyn Hejinian’s Book of a Thousand Eyes as a compass.

The Library of America celebrates the publication of Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories by posting audio recordings of nine famous writers reading ten of Anderson’s famous works. Hop on over to hear readings by Charles Baxter, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, and Patricia Hempl.

The Times Literary Supplement profiles Darkness at Noon author Arthur Koestler as an iconic “Dangerous Intellectual”: “‘My analysis … is: one third genius, one third blackguard and one third lunatic …’”

This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the “dispassionate first-person narrators” prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works.  “Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian.”