“What’s the point of reading literature?” Electric Literature shares a video that offers a compelling 4-point answer.
What’s the point?
La Piñata
“The only way to avenge all the things white people did to you was to get your kid into Harvard. You bided your time. You worked your ass off, day after day, year after year.” Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee has a new short story in Joyland called “La Piñata” (and of course you can also read her in these pages, too).
●
●
Dispatch from Brazil
Recommended Reading: Selections from the forthcoming Women Writing Brazil issue of PEN America’s Glossolalia.
Gorey and Macabre
Eve Bowen takes a trip to “Gorey Preserved,” an exhibition of “nearly every edition of every work published by [Edward] Gorey, in addition to illustrations for dust jackets and magazines, etchings, posters, and design ephemera,” on display at Columbia University until August 10th. Those unable to attend need not fret—Bowen walk readers through a history of the prolific illustrator’s work and includes plenty of links to his drawings online.
●
●
Wild Thing
Lord of the Flies is perhaps the best example of a book that forces readers to confront how wild we are. But there’s a whole corpus of books that accomplish the same thing. In The New Statesman, Erica Wagner writes about Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border.
Burrito Lit Vol. 2
Attention literature-lovers and burrito-consumers: Chipotle has announced the second batch of writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, and Neil Gaiman, for its Cultivating Thought series, which places short pieces of writing on soda cups and paper bags (we covered the first series here).
Why Did the Seagull Cross Konstantin?
David Henne brings a humorous list of lesser known Chekovian Techniques. Next up, Three Sisters walk into a bar jokes.
●
●
Bo Bartlett’s Winter Digs
“Romatic realist” painter Bo Bartlett, born in Columbus, Georgia, is renowned for his epic tableaus depicting a “Hopper-like sense of longing and mystery combined with a Lynchian-cocktail of menace, beauty, and stranger-than-fiction reality.” He was also a protégé and life-long friend of Andrew Wyeth. In Oxford American‘s most recent SoLost installment, the crew checks out Bartlett’s surprising and endearing winter workspace.
●
●