On Hikikomoris, Etc.

Our friends at The Common have organized a Postcard Auction, and you have until May 20 to bid online. Users can bid on the chance to have well-known authors – such as Adam Johnson, Téa Obreht, Chris Ware, and Kiese Laymon – send handwritten postcards to the address of their choosing. Come on, now. This is your chance to get a handwritten note from an Orange Prize-winner.

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. Don’t let this dissuade you from revising again and again, which can really improve a piece of writing.” Albert Camus, creative writing instructor.

We’ve published a fair number of pieces about the import of book covers. You may have read one of our US-UK book cover battles. Over at The Awl, Amanda Pickering takes a look at one of the stranger aspects of book design: the animals that appear on the covers of programming books.

A white male poet recently revealed his controversial strategy of using an Asian pseudonym to place his poems, which were eventually selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry anthology for 2015. Brian Spears writes for The Rumpus about the complications of diversity in publishing, Affirmative Action, and the ethics of poetry submission systems.