“The problem is that young children have terrible taste and enjoy garbage. Another problem, which compounds the first problem, is that they want to hear the same books hundreds of times in a row. So for all the joys that storytime can offer, it frequently entails a kind of dismal self-abnegation that’s too excruciating even to describe as tedium—an actively painful sense of my precious time on earth being torn from my chest and tossed into a furnace.” Gabriel Roth writes about the terrible Poky Little Puppy for Slate, and his complaints pair well with Jacob Lambert‘s Millions series, “Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?” and “Again, I Ask…“
The Problem with the Poky Little Puppy
Kafka’s Dogs
Recommended Reading: On the subject of dogs in Kafka’s works at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Our own Matt Seidel rereads The Metamorphosis in different places, letting his setting shape the reading of the text.
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“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
“Emotion, said the monk, is like a storm”
[Very Quick] Recommended Reading: “Negative Emotions” by Lydia Davis
Free That Verse
From the Beat poet to the particularly heroic couplet, here’s a handy illustration of poetic justice from Grant Snider over at The New York Times.
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“We call this fandemonium”
Reuters has a short piece on The Hunger Games and the long tradition of American Literary tourism. Well, when in Rome… or Atlanta…
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