“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”
Ugly Mugs
Recommended Reading: Walker Rutter-Bowman on Arthur Bradford’s Turtleface and Beyond. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book.
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Fear Factor
Colson Whitehead has some advice: write the book that “scares you shitless.” In a recent, wide-ranging interview with John Freeman, the Underground Railroad author talks about why he wrote his latest novel, along with his methods for sussing out good ideas. You could also read our review of The Underground Railroad.
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Arab Authors on Twitter
If you woke up this morning and thought, “You know, I could use more Arab authors on my Twitter feed,” then boy do I have the link for you.
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Chinese Publishing
The Guardian profiles the proliferation of Chinese self-publishing websites. Could this be the future of publishing?
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Madame Bovary, Say Wha?
Ruth Franklin rises to the defense of much-maligned (and newly retranslated) Emma Bovary.
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Shelf Life
“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’ Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez.” The meaning of book shelves.
War and Sociology
What can we learn about Leo Tolstoy by reading the German sociologist Max Weber? Let Jeremy Klemin from 3:AM Magazine explain. While we’re on Tolstoy, here’s a complementary piece that asks the age old question–who’s better: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?
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AutoSummarizing the Classics
Graphic designer Jason Huff takes the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduces them (pdf) using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function. Book Bench highlights several of the absurd – if occasionally poetic – results.
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