Claudia Rakine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was included in our own list of “Nine Books for the Post-Ferguson Era,” has been adapted for the stage, and previews are beginning in Los Angeles. Graywolf, the independent press behind Citizen, The Empathy Exams and On Immunity: An Inoculation, has interviewed the playwright behind the adaptation about the project and his process. As he explains it, “what makes the book—and the theatre piece—unique is that they expose and illuminate the small, sometimes unintended, and unconscious acts of everyday racism. Subtle, insidious, soul-crushing.”
Citizen on the Stage
The real Susan Orlean diet
The Skinny is acclaimed author Susan Orlean's strangest work, hands down: a half-serious diet book that advises women, among other things, to cover tempting food with bleach. Not one to follow her own advice, Orlean's diary of a week of eating for Grub Street features yogurt breakfasts, crackers eaten over sinks, and other basically realistic, bleach-free culinary adventures.
Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition -- as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex -- in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was "more than one person.”
Some Choice DFW Links
GQ offers an insightful interview with The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman on the subject of editing David Foster Wallace...while elsewhere, the German translation of Infinite Jest - Un Endlicher Spass - becomes an unlikely hit. (via)
Lowering the Millennial Boom
"Millennials in America are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult generation." Pew Research Center drops the boom mic. Pair with this confession by a self-proclaimed librarian drone.
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The Perks of Being A Wallflower
"Eleven years later, the Atlantic Monthly editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, made a similar request to an obscure, retiring poet named Emily Dickinson who had written a letter asking if her verses 'breathed.' Her response was much like Melville’s, if typically elliptical: 'Could you believe me—without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?'" The age-old problem: how writers deal with publicity.
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Cursing at Poets
At The Collagist, Kyle Beachy imagines the emperor Augustus saying to the poet Horace, "You and your kind are fucked!" "The Extent of Our Decline" is one of number of essays appearing in the collection I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, coming in March from Soft Skull.