Over at Hazlitt, Lesley Buxton’s moving essay on marriage, grief, and understanding will hit you square in the heart. Here’s an essay for The Millions by Lydia Yuknavitch on art and loss that is similarly heavy and no less wonderful.
Still Married
Lambda Literary Award Finalists
Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Award Finalists, who were announced this week. Finalists include Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Spender (our review of his memoir), and Truman Capote.
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The Curse of the Diaeresis
Okay, so the deal with the famed and occasionally disdained New Yorker umlaut on words like "cooperate" is that it is not an umlaut, it is a diaeresis, and they'll be holding onto it, thank you very much.
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World Literature Dispatches
Some world literature links: Sign and Sight offers the best introduction to Herta Müller I've been able to find...The Complete Review gets the ball rolling on Roberto Bolaño's (very) early novel Monsieur Pain, forthcoming from New Directions...Ingo Schulze, author of the quietly astonishing New Lives and the forthcoming One More Story, talks to The Toronto Star (via)...The NBCC features Yu Hua's Brothers...Claudio Magris is crowned the king of Frankfurt...Maud Newton hails Juan Gabriel Vásquez's "inventive and intricately plotted" The Informers...The Brooklyn Rail and Transcript both offer handsome online digests of short stories from around the world.
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Apple’s Foray into Education Publishing
If you missed Apple's "Education Announcement" last Thursday, you can check out Peter Kafka's play-by-play coverage of the event for AllThingsD. The whole affair made quite a splash because the biggest publishers in the world today are education publishers. The star of the show was iBooks 2, and it has many people talking: some view it as education publishing's savior, some fear it, and others think its EULA is downright creepy. At least one person believes the whole idea might've been the brain child of a lowly intern. And, finally, what should we make of Steve Jobs' 1996 admission that "what's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology?"
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“Great pendulous melons dangled like gods”
Recommended Reading: “The Pumpkin Tree” by Robert Wrigley.
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“In 1941, sadness is at its peak”
Here's a novel idea: using literature to map out the emotions of a time period. (1940s? Sad. 1920s? Happy. 2010s? ...Don't ask.)
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