Not sure why Harry Potter shares the fruits of his heroism? Upset that Hermione doesn’t end up with tons of cash? Well, then you should sit down with Ayn Rand’s version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, helpfully published at The Toast by Mallory Ortberg.
The Boy Who Mattered
Just Saying…
William Carlos Williams was a poet born for the age of Twitter. Or, rather, his poem "This is Just to Say" is perfect for Twitter parodies. Potato, potahto.
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Bowie is Among Us
Graywolf Press’s Poem of the Week is “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” by David Bowie-fan Tracy K. Smith. She writes, “Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep / Or charging through his veins.” Pair with Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s new memoir, Ordinary Light.
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Short Flight / Hobart Discount
Hobart is celebrating the month of June by offering a 20% discount on all of their Short Flight / Long Drive Books. You can pick up any two for $15. In particular I recommend Adam Novy’s Avian Gospels, a vividly imagined story of a young boy who can control flocks of birds. (I’ve recommended it before.) You can also get a taste for the book by watching its trailer over here.
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Kickstarting The Riveter
That Kickstarter is offering more opportunities than ever to literary projects, from Coffee House Press's Catstarter to the Joan Didion documentary to the Reading Rainbow spin-off, is indisputable. Now there's yet another worthy cause turning to the crowd-sourcing platform in search of an audience: The Riveter, a magazine of longform journalism by women.
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On Book Reviews
Kyle Minor (In the Devil's Territory) has written a delightful list of "Five Hazards of the Book Review Biz" for HTMLGiant.
Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?
Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.
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