This week, Football Book Club will be reading Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn and posting essays about Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Brain Fever is the 10th book of poetry from Hahn, who won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and an American Book Award in 2008 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010.
Football Book Club: Kimiko Hahn’s ‘Brain Fever’
Jane Austen Was Born in a Log Cabin
The Onion continues its blockbuster literary coverage with a look into the mind of an ordinary English professor. Her epiphany? No matter what she says, her students will believe her.
Gay Goth Look
“JUST STRAIGHT UP STANDING ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF YELLING AT THE NIGHT,” and other portraits of the inimitable Greek poet Sappho, ranked in order of how bummed out she looks.
New Black Panther Comic
Year in Reading alumna Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey will be writing a comic book series for Marvel alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Black Panther companion series will be titled World of Wakanda.
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Julian Assange Opens for M.I.A.
Now this is one of the strangest things to happen at a concert in a while: M.I.A. kicked off her tour to promote her new album Matangi by getting Julian Assange to open for her at Terminal 5. The Wikileaks founder spoke to the audience via Skype.
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Monday Linkday
The Guardian gives us Booker-winner Line of Beauty “condensed in the style of the original.”Some of you may have already seen this one: The 100 Greatest Books of all Time, also from the Guardian. How many have you read? I’m at 24, and I love that Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim makes the list. To anyone who is looking for a recommendation on what to read right now: get Lucky Jim, you’ll love it.Weren’t we talking about ISBNs the other day? Here’s a new blog about ISBNs and “book information” by a former Amazon employee and the creator of isbn.nu.Steve Landsburg asks: Too many books? I’m not completely sure I see his point. He seems to be implying that people only read one book a year. Furthermore, publishers fall all over themselves trying to create a blockbuster book; it’s far more cost-effective to promote a few guaranteed big sellers than a lot of risky titles. Sad but true. Perhaps the better thing to do is not to bemoan the inevitable Da Vinci Codes but to instead look for creative, cost-effective ways to promote riskier books.Malcolm Gladwell, author of the trendsetting book about trendsetting, The Tipping Point, has new book coming out called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which he “reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed.”
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