Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. You could also read Holloway McCandless on the author’s By Nightfall.
“Depression has a peculiar texture”
Good News for Libraries… Or Is It?
Pew Research published 10 Facts About Americans and Public Libraries, and some of the findings may surprise you. For example, would you have guessed that 26% of library patrons say their use has gone up in the past five years? Other findings, of course, won’t shock anybody — such as the fact that e-reading is on the rise, which, as I noted two years ago, poses some serious ecological challenges.
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Here Are Your Hugo Winners
The 2017 Hugo Award winners were announced in Helsinki, reports io9. For the second year in a row N.K. Jemisin came away with the best novel prize for her latest, The Obelisk Gate, and Ursula K. Le Guin (whom we interviewed a few years back) took “best related work” for her collection Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.
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Who Pays?
Once again, the old “who pays writers?” debate, this time courtesy of The Atlantic. Further reading: “Writers should be paid $1 million per article.”
Where In The World Are You?
Jim Harrison passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of 78, and there’s no better way to honor his memory (and get acquainted with his work) than to take a moment to sit down with these seven fantastic poems from his last collection, Dead Man’s Float.
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The Summer of Butterflies
In his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov travelled widely, logging many years each in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Ithaca, New York, where he wrote Lolita while teaching at Cornell. His peripatetic history explains why few people know he spent a summer in Utah, during which he spent a lot of time chasing butterflies and fishing in the streams. In The American Scholar, an excerpt of Nabokov in America, an upcoming book by Richard Roper. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
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Just Saying…
William Carlos Williams was a poet born for the age of Twitter. Or, rather, his poem “This is Just to Say” is perfect for Twitter parodies. Potato, potahto.
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