For those of you who’ve ever wondered to what extent e.e. cummings wrote prose the way he wrote poetry, there’s this letter to consider, published by The Paris Review Daily to commemorate the poet’s birthday. It’s addressed to Ezra Pound, and it features phrases including but not limited to “macarchibald maclapdog macleash.”
concerning
New Novel, New Excerpt
Darcey Steinke has a new novel, Sister Golden Hair, coming out this fall, and Granta has an excerpt available online. For more about Steinke, be sure to read Lydia Millet‘s praise for her early novel, Jesus Saves.
Global Crises, International Art
Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich put together a reading list to help children understand the global refugee experience, and Kaveh Akbar compiled a list of poems from the seven countries — Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria — impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order. Meanwhile, Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) has been curating a Spotify playlist of music from those countries as well.
Read what you want.
After last week’s NYT “Room for Debate” feature, ostensibly in answer to the question of why so many adults read YA fiction, Roger Sutton at the Horn Book took umbrage at the panelists’ only partial engagement with the question. In the end though, he makes his own position clear: “I don’t worry about adults reading YA novels. Read what you want.”
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Writing to Explain Yourself to Yourself
The Tide King author Jen Michalski shares a wonderfully honest account of how she managed to write her way out of the closet. “People, mostly nonwriters, are always surprised when I tell them I wrote so much growing up,” she says. “But those words, I want to tell them, weren’t written for anyone else – the audience who needed to see them and the audience for whom they were written was me.”
Multiple Personas
If all you associate Ingmar Bergman with is moody chess games and dead doves, it’s time to add “novelist” to the list.