A couple weeks ago, we published our review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the follow-up to his debut Leaving the Atocha Station. At the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Adam Plunkett argues that 10:04 inadvertently reveals its author’s poetic training. The book, he says, “dissolves into a poem.”
Down to/Poetry
City On A Hill
"I was born in the lair of Romulus and Remus, Washington D.C." And The Los Angeles Review of Book's interview with the late Gore Vidal just gets better from there.
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This Glorious Respite
"It is now, at this precise moment when I become woefully aware of the cruel transience of this seasonal offering, rarely lingering beyond the Marigold blooms of latter March, and at once I am lost amidst a magnificent vision, one in which our hallowed Saint Patrick himself is riding shotgun alongside me in this very Camry." In which James Joyce orders a shamrock milkshake.
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The Pioneer Detectives Comes to a TV Near You
Last week Konstantin Kakaes — whose new book The Pioneer Detectives is our latest Millions Original — led a discussion on "how scientists search for truth and how that search isn't always straight-forward." You can catch a broadcast of that discussion tonight on BookTV at 7:30 PM.
The Sagrada Família’s New Completion Date
The Sagrada Família, which Antoni Gaudí began designing in 1883, is due to be completed in 2026. Recently, 60 Minutes aired a feature on the masterpiece envisioned by “God’s architect,” and a new video depicts the work still be done, as well as what the church will look like when it’s finally completed. You can also take a virtual tour of the interior as well.
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The Great Gadsby
"The entire manuscript was written with the E-type bar of the typewriter tied down; thus making it impossible for that letter to be printed. This was done so that none of that vowel might slip in, accidentally; and many did try to do so!" Abe Books tells the tale of Gadsby, a self-published 50,000-word novel written without using the letter "e." Its author, Ernest Vincent Wright, won some notoriety when he accomplished the feat – called a lipogram – in 1939, although it's unlikely Wright could have foreseen that individual copies of his book would eventually fetch prices upward of $1,200. And if it's literary hijinks you're after, definitely read our own Anne Yoder on the work of Georges Perec, who wrote a lipogram of his own in 1969.
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