Recommended Reading: Alexandra Schwartz on Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo.
L’Ecrivain
Living in Letters
Recommended Reading: On the collected letters and lovers of Iris Murdoch.
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Poet Laureate (Again)
“Her exchanges with Americans in small towns and rural communities are inspiring an appreciation of poetry and history – and remind us that poetry has value for all of our lives.” The Library of Congress appointed Tracy K. Smith to a second term as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2018-2019. For her second term, Smith edited an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which will be published by Graywolf Press in association with the Library of Congress. Pair with: our review of Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light.
only sell to the rich or deranged
The folks at BookRide, the blog of London’s beloved antiquarian bookstore Any Amount Books, have published a handy set of guidelines for curmudgeonly booksellers. When Kyo Maclear visited The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto, it would seem that they had yet to stumble upon this code of curmudgeonly conduct.
“At once sensuous and crisp”
Last week, I wrote about the new Philip Marlowe novel by Benjamin Black, aka Year in Reading alum John Banville. Over the weekend, Banville published an essay in The Guardian about writing the iconic character, whom he describes as “one of the immortals.”
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Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
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E-reading with Jonathan Franzen
It was with “a sort of resigned sigh” that Jonathan Franzen signed some reddit user’s kindle.
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