“Who cares if I really hate sports
And for work, he writes ‘baseball reports’?
It’s only one date
I mean, this could be fate!
Nope, nevermind, he’s the worst.”
Limericks for lost online dates.
There Once Was a Girl from Secaucus
#DiverseCanLit
We’ve been following the raging debate about diversity in the publishing industry, which recently re-triggered when BookExpo America released a speaker list of “29 white people and a cat” (as The Toast summed it up). The panel was rebalanced, but debate around the root issue continues: recent data indicates, for example, that while the US has become more diverse in population, the number of multicultural childrens’ books has remained flat under 10 percent for two decades. Follow the continuing debate on Twitter hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #DiverseCanLit, or look to this helpful round-up of blogs and articles at BookRiot.
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The Perils of Book Lending
We’ve all been there, right? Your neighbor lends you a book, you don’t treat it very carefully, she complains, so you thrust a samurai sword inches from her face. It happens.
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New TQC
The newest issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up. Eclectic as ever, it features pieces on Yasushi Inoue, Jose Saramago, Stephen Dixon, Thomas Bernhard, and more.
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Roth v. Roth v. Roth
In April’s Atlantic, Joseph O’Neill tries to separate Philip Roth from his perpetual themes of family, Newark, and Judaism, and from his many authorial personae. The task proves unmanageable, but the attempt sheds light on the man destined to become Roth’s greatest critic: Roth himself.
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Keys Under the Basket
“Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!” Introducing literary couchsurfing.
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