Erdrich’s Love Medicine

“What happened that night? Your final night?” The New Statesman publishes poet laureate Ted Hughes’ long lost poem “Last Letter,” inspired by the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath. Actor Jonathan Pryce gave a reading of the poem for Channel 4 News.

New this week are Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance and P.D. James’ Pride and Prejudice sequel Death Comes to Pemberly. Joseph Gordon-Levitt hangs up his acting duds to put out The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, and, speaking of tiny stories, there’s Lou Beach’s 420 Characters: “these crystalline miniature stories began as Facebook status updates.” On the nonfiction side, there’s Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller.

A release date for D’Angelo’s long-anticipated Voodoo follow-up is due any day now, so I really recommend checking out Amy Wallace’s stellar profile of the artist to stoke your interest.

Rosie Schaap espouses the joys of cooking for others “in a powerfully fraught, anxious time” such as ours. “I wanted, at least in this small way,” she writes, “to give comfort—both to myself and to my loved ones.” And as our own Hannah Gersen has noted, if you’re fortunate to have such a good friend for a chef, you can read a cookbook while they work.

Is Rick Reilly’s poem about Tim Tebow so terrible that it could’ve sent “a shockwave through time, producing reverberations before it ever happen[ed]?” Matt Ufford thinks so.