“So a single image can split open the hard seed of the past, and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory.” Read an excerpt from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir at Longreads. Pair with Beth Kephart’s essay on how memoir can be a conversation between reader and writer.
The Birth of Memory
Revenge of the Pigeons?
Will 2012 be the year they finally rise up against us? A study finds pigeons can do higher math.
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New Directions in The Coffin
The Coffin Factory, a “magazine for people who love books,” interviews New Directions’ Barbara Epler and Tom Roberge about “publishing and finding bold, new experiments in literature from around the world.” (via)
Dick Wimmer is dead! Long live Dick Wimmer!
Any writer who has felt the sting of rejection—that is, all writers—will be inspired by the story of Dick Wimmer, who has died at the age of 74. Over the course of 25 years, a total of 162 agents and publishers rejected Wimmer’s first novel, Irish Wine, before it was finally published by Mercury House in 1989. The New York Times called it a “taut, finely written, exhaustingly exuberant first novel.” The L.A. Times invoked James Joyce in its review. Wimmer, the iron man of the rejection wars, went on to publish two sequels, Boyne’s Lassie and Hagar’s Dream (All three books are now available in a single volume from Soft Skull.) The moral of Wimmer’s story? Never give up.
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Jon Cotner’s Floating World
As part of the River to River Festival, poet Jon Cotner has put together a “floating world,” or a map of Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō’s work transposed onto Rockefeller Park. Each hour, Cotner will lead a tour through the world. This isn’t the first time Cotner’s done something cool like this, either. Check out our dispatch from his “Poem Forest” last year.
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The Water: Stay Out of It
Shark Week 2013 isn’t for another ten months, but you can satisfy your hunger for tales of nautical catastrophe and man-eating fish with these two databases: WreckSite, a collection of shipwrecks classified by worldwide positions, and The International Shark Attack File, a compilation of “all known shark attacks.”
“Is it possible to overcome the horrible legacy of slavery and find decolonial love?”
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, sits down with Paula M.L. Moya for a great interview focusing on race at The Boston Review.
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