If you know what the phrase “hypertext story” means, you’re likely at least passingly familiar with new media literature, which first appeared all the way back in the days of floppy disks. At Ploughshares, a brief introduction to the genre, with a nod to hypertext ur-teacher and novelist Robert Coover. You could also read Guy Patrick Cunningham on writing in the digital age.
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“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
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Found in Translation
“The night of the typhoon, the sky was full, the world destroyed.” Eleanor Goodman is one of 13 translators who won the PEN/Heim Translation Fund this year. Goodman won for her translation of Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni’s collection, Something Crosses My Mind, which will be published by Zephyr Press.
Wild Possibilities
“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.” Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me, on maintaining hope and resisting defeatism.
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Who owns a story?
“Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?” Both? Roxana Robinson writes for The New York Times’ Opinionator blog about “The Right to Write.”
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