Comic of the Week: Over at Electric Lit, check out Grant Snider’s comic on why we ban books. We look at The Lorax and other dangerous books in honor of Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week
A Special Kind of Hell
It seems to be true that everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. In private letters now up for auction, Harper Lee compared Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal resort to hell on earth. Pair with Gabriel Brownstein’s recent essay on Trump as reality turned to cliche.
●
●
Wetlands
Recommended Reading: Blake Morrison on the literature of England’s flood-prone east coast.
What is Poetry?
“Poetry is clumps of words that make people feel something,” says Wendy MacLeod, in answer to one of Poetry’s most frequently asked questions on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
●
●
A Pulitzer Winner ‘First’ Turns 101
June 7th would have been Gwendolyn Brooks‘ 101st birthday. In remembrance of her we encourage you to read her works and reflect on a legacy. To get you started Shondaland has a good primer on this cool poet, who became the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize. Pair it with this essay on Brooks and reading outside your culture.
Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
Which Wilder?
We’ve written about the newly published Laura Ingalls Wilder memoir several times, but a new review in the LA Times calls attention to one of the most interesting questions raised by the work: how much influence did Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, an accomplished author in her own right, have on the final Little House books?
●
●