“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
The 12th Caine Prize
NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “Hitting Budapest" (pdf).
Tuesday New Release Day: Adichie, Knausgaard, Brown
New in fiction this week is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. The second volume of Karl Knausgaard's My Struggle hits American shores (read about Volume One). Oh yeah, and that Dan Brown guy has a book out.
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Poetic Graphics
This week in book-related graphics: An image-heavy test that combines poetry with traffic signs from Ploughshares, and an infographic breaking down the most fearsome (and most useless) characters in The Iliad.
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“One, Two, Three, Four. We Want this Superstore.”
Fox Books has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Onion reported. But in reality, Barnes & Noble is facing some big problems, which inspired Michael Agger to write a thank you note to the troubled bookstore. "Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field."
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Bits
Millions reader Lisa found Booker winner Line of Beauty to be "a more intellectualized, less satirical version of Stephen Fry's The Liar." I'm sure Lisa won't mind if you borrow that line at the next cocktail party.The new Gabriel Garcia Marquez book (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, they're calling it now) continues to generate headlines. This time Gabo foils the pirates. Go Gabo!At Amazon you can watch Jon Stewart make an ISBN joke whilst hawking his book America. Just click on the link and then check out the "Amazon.com Exclusives."Spotted on the El: Truman Capote's "unfinished novel" Answered Prayers.
Donald Barthelme’s Reading List
The Believer posts a 2003 essay featuring Donald Barthelme's reading list, which came secondhand to Kevin Moffett, a self-professed non-reader: "Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books 'in no particular order, just read them,' which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do." (via The Paris Review)
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