“If I could paint or compose music, I would want to finally arrive at what I felt was beauty for me and for others. I would trust that if I could make something that was beautiful, it would also be true, the way Charlie Parker is true or a Shostakovich cello concerto is true, and I feel the same way about writing. I try to make something beautiful out of language.” Fogged Clarity interviews Stuart Dybek about the writing process and Ecstatic Cahoots, which we mentioned in our 2014 Book Preview.
Something Beautiful
Exhausted by Celebrity
"Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs," reports The Guardian. "About time," we say.
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Lost English Letters
I suppose that "Now I know my thorn, wynn, yoghs..." just doesn't have the same ring to it, after all.
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Walt Whitman Reads
Recommended listening: 19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors Reading, as compiled by Mental Floss, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor. For a different perspective on the word "rare" as applied to digital culture, be sure to read Rex Sorgatz's recent piece for Medium, "You Need to Hear this Extremely Rare Recording."
SF’s Thriving Libraries
Book lovers say it's nothing to keep quiet about: San Francisco's libraries are thriving.
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If A Boy Could Dream
“I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer.” Ocean Vuong on immigrating into English and the first poem he ever wrote.