Recommended Reading: Janet Maslin on Peter Carey’s Amnesia. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Carey’s His Illegal Self.
Gough’s Tale
Excerpted
From the book I’m reading right now: “My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood.”
Jack Gilbert Dies at the Age of 87
Jack Gilbert died yesterday at the age of 87. Gilbert was the author of five standalone poetry collections—as well as additional collected volumes such as last March’s Collected Poems—and he was also a past winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. For The LA Times, John Penner reviews the poet’s legacy. Or, perhaps as fitting tribute to Gilbert’s life and work, better to hear his own final lines to the poem “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
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Good News for Libraries… Or Is It?
Pew Research published 10 Facts About Americans and Public Libraries, and some of the findings may surprise you. For example, would you have guessed that 26% of library patrons say their use has gone up in the past five years? Other findings, of course, won’t shock anybody — such as the fact that e-reading is on the rise, which, as I noted two years ago, poses some serious ecological challenges.
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L’Affaire Martel
In the HuffPo, the proprietors of San Francisco’s Booksmith defend Yann Martel‘s Beatrice and Virgil…sort of. I feel like I’m having Kindly Ones déja vü.
Billy Pilgrim Is Unstuck
“How can a horrific event, so monstrous it seems incomprehensible, be told? How does one even find the words to write about it?” For The Paris Review, Matteo Pericoli takes a look at Slaughterhouse-Five and the bridge between fiction and architecture.
The Fall of the House of Medill
Megan McKinney’s Magnificent Medills and Amanda Smith’s Newspaper Titan chronicle the escapades of Joseph Medill and the power and zaniness of his prominent press family.
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Jericho Brown and Carmen Maria Machado on the Meaning of Pride
Jericho Brown and Carmen Maria Machado examine their personal relationships to Pride, 50 years after the first Pride March.
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Matt Steinglass Contra Katie Roiphe
According to the title of Matt Steinglass‘ new essay (a qualified rebuttal of Katie Roiphe‘s recent piece “The Naked and the Conflicted“), “Today’s Male Novelists Do Write Exuberant Sex Scenes, But Mostly Lesbian Ones“