Implicit in a lot of the discussions about how negative a book reviewer can be is a question of utility: is a book review an act of public service or a work of art in itself? In the Times, James Parker and Anna Holmes debate the purpose of the review. Sample quote: “I’d argue that a majority of the reading public doesn’t necessarily benefit from the sorts of reviews for which artistry is the point.” You could also read our own Matt Seidel’s hypothetical worst review ever.
Civil Servants
“Abroad, you could be anything”
Following the news that Beyoncé sampled a TED talk given by Year in Reading contributor Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Tin House dug up an interview with the author, who says that to this day, when she looks at the manuscript of Americanah, she feels “thrilled and amazed that [she] actually finished writing this.”
RIP Mark Strand
In memory of Mark Strand, who passed away on Saturday, the Paris Review Daily published a manuscript page from “A Piece of the Storm,” a poem that appeared in Strand's collection A Blizzard of One. They also included links to several poems of his they published, as well as his Art of Poetry interview.
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The Applicant
"'Poetry, I feel," said Sylvia Plath in a radio interview in 1962, the year before her suicide, 'is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you've got to burn away all the peripherals.'" Fifty years after her death, an argument for close reading.
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The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte's Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.
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Literary Destinations
Over at The Week, Jeva Lange recommends books based on where your travels are taking you this summer. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
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Do You Really Want That Literary Prize?
Researchers have determined that "winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.” So if you’re very sensitive, take some solace in the fact that you haven’t won a major award, I guess.
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