In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
The New VC
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.”
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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The mystery of the skull that might once have sat between the shoulders of one William Shakespeare will remain unresolved for now. A senior church lawyer for St. Leonard’s Church in Beoley, Redditch, has barred the group of curious clergymen from removing the skull for DNA testing. Alas, poor William.
D) All of the Above
“I guess the book could be read also as poetry, but I just didn’t want to define this book, I didn’t want to put it under any label.” The Rumpus interviews Chilean author Alejandro Zambra about his newest book, Multiple Choice. And if you want more Zambra – and believe us, you do – we interviewed him too back in 2011.
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Colors: Definitions and Names
Kory Stamper, one of the lexicographers responsible for Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, describes the pleasures and poetry to be found in the Third Edition’s “color definitions.” Take vermillion for example, which is listed as “a variable color averaging a vivid reddish orange that is redder, darker, and slightly stronger than chrome orange, redder and darker than golden poppy, and redder and lighter than international orange.” (Related: how colors got their names; who names colors what.)
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A New Kind of Book Review
A new kind of book review: 5 artists interpret and critique literature through works of visual art.
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Mariama Bâ, Grande Dame of African Literature
Mariama Bâ, hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent, was one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author.
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Street Preachers and Tacos
“Even if I bought cars in department store parking lots, and even if I followed small children down wooded paths, I still knew better than to accept tuna fish from strangers in national parks.” At The Hairpin, Jami Attenberg writes about meeting a street preacher in Moab. For more Attenberg, read her not-quite-a-restaurant review of Café de La Esquina at The Morning News.