“When it comes to the personal essay, we want so much and there is something cannibalistic about our desire. We want essayists to splay themselves bare. We want to see how much they are willing to bleed for us. This desire introduces an interesting tension for essay writers. How much should they bleed, and how much blood should they save for themselves?” Roxane Gay reviews Meghan Daum‘s The Unspeakable and reflects on the personal essay for The New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s Millions review of the same book.
Something Cannibalistic
There Is No End
"In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write." On writing and tenacity.
Forgetting Poetry
We all probably had the humiliating experience of reciting a poem in high school. Yet at Salon, Nina Kang believes that memorizing poetry is a lost art. She blames the loss of the discipline on our tendency to skim and new poetry's seeming aversion to memorization. "Writers actively fight against the appearance of artifice, and often instead strive for an informal, offhand tone, with that hint of clumsiness that lends a certain authenticity to the voice. It turns out this is a quality that makes the reciter’s job that much more difficulty." Here's our take on the lost art of recitation.
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Laughing with Shakespeare
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Curiosities: The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop
Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. SeussThe Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Joseph O'Neill (via).A primer from Bookride for using the web to check the values of old books. "The first thing to remember is that most books are of low value or no value. Some books are worth less than nothing."The second issue of Wag's Revue is out, featuring an interview with T.C. Boyle.For fans of The Wire, issue four of darkmatter Journal analyzes the series with essays like "The Politics of Brisket: Jews and The Wire" and "The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO's The Wire".The Rumpus gets listy with George Pelecanos' favorite WesternsThe Second Pass follows up on our "Most Anticipated" list with a few more books to look forward to.
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Appropriate Today More Than Ever
For the tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich has penned a new foreword and introduction which you can read here.
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Paul Murray on Epic Fail
"'There's no success like failure,' Bob Dylan once sang – but he couldn't have envisaged the international notoriety that bad art would achieve in the digital age. Mark O'Connell's Epic Fail gleefully hops genres and centuries in a quest to understand our obsession with lameness. Clever, profound, bitingly funny, it's a brilliant analysis from one of the smartest new critics around." — Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
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