“Only the moon can judge Indiana. It’s a state that mostly gets ignored, and occasionally ridiculed, by the rest of the country, but no matter. Anyone is welcome to come here and see a reflection of themselves in the unlikeliest places, no matter what any law says.” Adam Fleming Petty on “Writing from the Nowhere State.”
Nowhere, Indiana
You are Muriel Spark
"The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet." If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton's article at The Toast. We aren't surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.
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Museum of Natural History
“Rather than showing one isolated capsule, the new hall would encompass nature and the human world…. The central theme would not be a certain animal, or even the landscape portrayed. Not one story but the fact that the stories are there. Albert E. Parr, strongly influenced by the burgeoning field of ecology, believed that the interconnectedness between disciplines was the story of the world.” Jaime Green writes for Longreads about the narratives behind the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. Also check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
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Poetry Is Politics, Politics Is Poetry
Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, "The white students aren't being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop."
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The Good Kind of Bad
In a Simpsons episode from the late nineties, Lisa Simpson, concerned that her mental skills may be deteriorating, manages to finagle her way onto a local TV news broadcast, where she urges the residents of Springfield to read two books: To Kill a Mockingbird and Harriet the Spy. At first glance, the two novels might not seem to have that much in common, but as Anna Holmes argues in a blog post for The New Yorker, the books share “ideas about the complexity, sophistication, and occasional wickedness of young girls’ imaginations.” (You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Malcolm Gladwell and To Kill a Mockingbird.)
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Judge It By This
Year in Reading alum Chang-Rae Lee has a new book out this week, and its cover is making headlines. Readers who buy the limited edition of On Such A Full Sea will get the first 3D printed book cover in publishing history. According to the printers, each cover took fifteen hours to make.
Translating Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the world’s most translated books. In German alone, there are over 40 different translations. A new project published by Oak Knoll Press devotes three volumes to exploring the challenges of translating Carroll’s wit, puns, and linguistic tricks in 174 languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu.
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“The truth of poetry is not the truth of history”
Philip Levine is the current US Poet Laureate, and that's great, but wouldn't we all rather live in this alternate world fashioned by The Onion?