From our own Michael Bourne comes a new short story, “Beautiful,” available from The Southampton Review.
Beautiful
Weekend Links
When I was a kid, I read the whole Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and never thought about it being “for girls.” At Slate, Emily Bazelon writes about why it’s wrong that “the conventional educational wisdom holds that boys don’t like to read about girls.”The New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember from 2005 (via Conversational Reading)It’s Perfectly Normal, a sex education book by Robie H. Harris tops the American Library Association’s list of 10 Most Challenged Books of 2005. Also on the list: The Catcher in the Rye and the Captain Underpants series.The Ten Worst Autobiographies as listed by The Independent. Not sure where else you’d find Hillary Clinton, James Frey and Hitler on the same list. (via Books Inq.)A New Orleans resident auctions off a bunch of “first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers” to raise money for Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who published some of Charles Bukowski’s earlest works and were left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
Familiar Ground
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Summer Poems
Clear your schedule for today, if you have one. The Poetry Foundation rounded up a whole heap of “Summer Poems” intended to “make you one with the sun.”
The Space In-between the Appalachians
Maybe you’ve been enjoying Crapalachia (Excerpt) as much as everybody else these days – or perhaps you’re just a big fan of the Appalachians (and hopefully not MTV’s Buckwild). Either way, you should get a kick out of Scott Hubener’s The Space In-between project. The photography series “documents the landscape and residents along U.S. Route 23, between Asheville, North Carolina, and Johnson City, Tennessee.”
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You Don’t Shoot the Beard!
The Observer profiles Baumbach père: Jonathan, that is, whose new novel, Dreams of Molly, is out in May from Dzanc books.
Fine Editions
We’ve seen a proliferation of junky editions of out-of-copyright classics, but we’ve also noted gorgeous new hardcovers from Penguin and now from much smaller outfit White’s Books, including Emma, Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books, and several others.
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The Nervous Breakdown
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the new books and culture website The Nervous Breakdown. They’ve already got a great interview with Millions favorite Dan Chaon, as well as some interesting essays that I’m looking forward to digging into. I also like their “self-interview” series–where writers ask, and answer, their own questions.
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