John Clare, “the peasant poet,” wrote wide-ranging poems on rural themes, distinguishing himself from his peers in the 19th-century literary scene in England. In 1830, in the midst of an episode of depression, he wrote a long polemic against the first-person pronoun, in the form of a letter to his friend Eliza Emmerson. In The Paris Review Daily, an excerpt of the letter.
Not I
Tuesday New Release Day: Buckley; May; Vallgren; Miller
Out this week: The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley; Paradise City by Elizabeth May; The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren; and The Penguin Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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9 Big Books from Small Publishers
From The Huffington Post: nine big books from small presses.
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To Grit or Not To Grit?
Recommended Reading: On whether or not "grit" is the true key to workplace (and lifetime) success. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, says yes.
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No Shyster, He
Thanks to the efforts of Gerald Leonard Cohen, the world now knows where the word “jazz” came from, why certain types of sausages came to be called “hot dogs” and how New York got the nickname “The Big Apple.”
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On That F*ckin’ “A”
Members of the Word Reference forum contemplate the etymology and meaning of the “A” in the expression, “Fuckin’ A.” Elsewhere Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist and author of Assholism: The First Sixty Years, shares his take on the ubiquitous “a-word,” which he believes originated during World War II.
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From Well-Read to Well-Written
Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community celebrating "the uniqueness of Black literature & sisterhood," has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its inaugural writers' conference and festival. Past WRBG book club guests include Year in Reading alums Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Flournoy, whom we also interviewed about her debut novel The Turner House.
Do They Accept Curiosities?
Experimental literary magazine theNewerYork wants to "screw with your head." They also want you to submit "short but challenging pieces" for publication.
Shhhh!
The sound level of a typical quiet bedroom measures 30 decibels, but what if you still can't concentrate on your reading? Well, maybe you should move to Minneapolis and use Steven Orfield's "anechoic chamber," which at -9 decibels is officially the quietest room in the world.
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