“For American readers, literary evocations of Korea have come, for the most part, in the form of dystopian novels written by people without any direct connection to the country.” Ed Park on reading Dalkey Archive Press’s series Library of Korean Literature, launched in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
Dispatch from Korea
We’re Going with “Greatest”
“The actress and author of a new children’s book, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, has contemplated throwing the writer Michel Houellebecq across a room.” Great NYT subhead or greatest NYT subhead?
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Bright Star
Keats on film! See the trailer for Jane Campion‘s Bright Star.
Walt Whitman Reads
Recommended listening: 19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors Reading, as compiled by Mental Floss, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor. For a different perspective on the word “rare” as applied to digital culture, be sure to read Rex Sorgatz‘s recent piece for Medium, “You Need to Hear this Extremely Rare Recording.”
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Cheering Up the Country
Recommended Reading: Booker Prize winner Anne Enright on Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December.
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Stranger Than Fiction
This essay from Adrian Barnes at The Daily Beast on cancer and fiction and how the two mirror one another is eerie and fascinating. This review of Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby from The Millions addresses this tendency of writing and real world illnesses to feed of of one another.
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Digital (and Australian?) Shakespeare
Now that the Folger Shakespeare Library is working to digitize the complete works of the bard, it’s worth asking the question, just what did that dude sound like?
An Encounter with a Stranger
Over at Longreads, you can read the first chapter of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night – one of the most anticipated books of 2016.
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Romance Incarnate
The best way to celebrate May Day? Read Tennyson‘s “The May Queen,” become “Romance Incarnate.”