Living Like Fitzgerald

Out this week: The Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique; Last Stories and Other Stories by William T. Vollmann; High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire; The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai; Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch; A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor; The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga; Don’t Try to Find Me by Holly Brown; The Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe; Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco; Road Ends by Mary Lawson; and our own Edan Lepucki’s California (which you may have seen on Colbert). For more, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.

Recommended Reading: Bomani Jones’s essay on Outkast’s ATLiens, his first car, and the way things from your past just seem different as the years go by.

B|ta’arof – which launched last year – announced a new poetry series featuring translations of “contemporary poems written in Persian and translated into English by emerging poets and scholars in the Iranian diaspora.” The translations will be accompanied by brief interviews with the translators, each consisting of the same five questions. “The idea,” according to the mission statement, “is to pull back the curtain on the process of translation, revealing how it is subject to individual choices and proclivities—the first choice being what poem to even translate.”

In a turn of events that are probably not good for Baltimore’s reputation for decay, the Edgar Allen Poe House might close due to lack of funds. The Times had the details when news of the troubles first broke; at The Paris Review, you can find more links and laments.