This week in book-related internet graphics: Penguin has created an interactive map of literary genres, complete with some very creatively shaped “countries”. As Electric Literature points out, “the fact that the map is aimed at current self-publishing authors explains why YA is it’s own continent while genres like Gothic fiction don’t exist.”
Genre: A Map
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A Most Terrible State
Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot’s mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
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Why Barry Writes
In the pages of Oxford American, the late Barry Hannah confesses to writing “out of a greed for lives and language.”
The NYRB Mantle
The question of who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers passes the torch is a good one. Surely it’s one of the most desirable jobs in all of publishing.
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Thomas Pynchon: The Comic Strip
Galley Cat highlights a 2003 comic strip, “Thomas Pynchon, Man of Mystery,” that is unfortunately yet to go into syndication.
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Garth Greenwell Recommends
Garth Greenwell has a reading recommendation for you. Check out an excerpt from Jonathan Lee’s High Dive at Electric Literature. Pair with our review of Greenwell’s What Belongs to You.