Recommended listening: Benjamin Percy, whose novel The Dead Lands was released just this week, sings “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Writers” for the debut episode of Poets & Writers‘s new podcast, Ampersand.
Don’t Let ‘Em
An Experimental Review of an Experimental Translation
Matthew Jakubowski’s “experimental review” of Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue is unlike anything you’ve read in months, and I promise you that.
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“Rainbow Potato Day” Has a Nice Ring
Gaia, Pale Blue Dot, Lonely Planet, etc… It’s time for a new addition to Earth’s list of aliases: the rainbow potato. A new map of our planet’s gravity field reveals the variations in gravitational pull depending on your geographic location.
From the Crawleys to the Capulets
Romeo and Juliet is getting the Downton Abbey treatment. The first trailer for Julian Fellowes’ adaptation is out and features Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth as the ill-fated young lovers.
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Words on the street.
Ian Crouch on the place of real estate in the novel, and its tenedency to “reinforce our modern sense that the appearance of our houses, and the taste and class that they represent, are among the defining elements of modern selfhood.”
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Pirouettes
We’ve covered the Atlantic series By Heart a number of times before. It features notable authors writing about their favorite passages. In the latest edition, Mary-Beth Hughes picks out a paragraph from Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, about a poet who’s trying to cope with grief. Sample quote: “Reading Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing.”
Sunshine Journalism
California seems to have it all: Hollywood, the sun, vineyards, and more. Yet it doesn’t have a weekly magazine. California Sunday will change that by launching a magazine delivered on digital platforms daily and in local print newspapers every Sunday. Bonus: They’re hiring.
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NBA Nominee Hits Shelves
Another new release this week: Jaimy Gordon’s book Lord of Misrule, a small press underdog recently nominated for the National Book Award.
A Disturbance in the Force of the Joyce Estate
Our own Mark O’Connell likens James Joyce’s grandson to a “highbrow Darth Vader.”
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