“The very best way to read a poem is perhaps to be young, intelligent, and slightly drunk.” The Atlantic offers 20 strategies for reading poetry, and they pair well with Leah Falk‘s look at “Performance Anxiety: When Poets Read Aloud.”
Reading Poetry
Smith and Hickock Struck Again
The bodies of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock – the subjects of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – may be exhumed in order to solve a 1959 murder in Osprey, Florida.
●
●
Parul Sehgal in NYTBR
●
●
New Wave of Confessions
For The Guardian, Rafia Zakaria writes on the new wave of confessional “feminist” memoirs. As she puts it, “We’re on an uncomfortable tightrope between a bold new dialogue about women and sex, and the monetisation of that conversation by powers that recognise that as a gap in the market.” Pair with this Millions essay on feminist pop anthems.
Why Are Writers Paid So Little, and Programmers Paid So Much?
“And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’”
●
●
Anecdotes On-Screen
Attention all readers who want to talk pretty one day: a story by David Sedaris has just been made into a film.
●
●
Coming Soon: Beautiful Ruins
Todd Field, who directed In the Bedroom and Little Children, is going to bring Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins to the big screen. The book was a big favorite among this year’s Year In Reading contributors.
●
●
“YA fiction has blossomed outside the literary world’s prestige economy.”
In response to an article in the Atlantic observing that women dominate the world of YA fiction, Laura Miller wonders whether men avoid and women embrace YA fiction for the same reason: it offers little prestige.