Writers of facial stage direction, beware: it is not actually the epitome of irony that smiling and crying can seem so oddly similar. At Aeon, Princeton professor Michael Graziono argues that the seemingly opposite gestures may just share evolutionary origins. (Pair with: Darwinist theories about “the evolution of the novel.”)
Smiles to tears
New Jhumpa Lahiri Novel
This just in: Jhumpa Lahiri has a new novel coming in September called The Lowland.
Looking Back
The Morning News “gathered writers and thinkers around the world and asked them to sift through the past year of revolutions, deaths, discoveries, and breakthroughs to answer: What was the most important event of 2011?”
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Tonight’s Guest is a Poet
There was a time, believe it or not, when poets made appearances on widely-seen American talk shows. That time was the fifties and sixties, when Carl Sandburg appeared on The Today Show, The Ed Sullivan Show and Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. (He also gave a speech before Congress and competed on What’s My Line?)
Tuesday New Release Day: Evison, Oates, Theroux, Fontane
New this week is Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story about the death of her husband (this was the source of her recent, quite moving essay in the New Yorker), and the expanded rerelease of Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Also new on shelves from NYRB Classics is Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, who discussed Fontane in our Year in Reading in December.
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Pablo Neruda Was Murdered
Following the recent exhumation of Pablo Neruda, “there is new evidence showing he was likely murdered by agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet.” A judge has subsequently ordered a hunt for the poet’s killer.