This week, the upstanding men and women of Football Book Club are reading Louisa Hall’s novel Speak — and posting about (a) having their minds blown by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and (b) having their metaphoric hearts metaphorically stomped on by the NFL.
Football Book Club: Louisa Hall’s ‘Speak’
Imaginary Oklahoma
“Imaginary Oklahoma” writes Oklahoman writer James McGirk, “is an anthology of forty-six writers’ attempts to envision Oklahoma without ever having visited America’s forty-sixth state.” You can get a taste for the pieces over at The Paris Review, or you can check out the book trailer and attempt to envision The Paris Review's write-up without actually reading it.
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“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
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The Story Writer and His Writer Friend
Beautiful Ruins author (and Year in Reading favorite) Jess Walter describes “the genesis of a story.”
South Africa, 2010
The last of the World Cup qualifying matches wrapped up this week and the final list of qualified teams is in. See the list of the 32 qualified national teams headed for South Africa in 2010 here.
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Didion’s Perfect Synthesis
"Many writers write vexed introspection, or detail-oriented reporting, or counterintuitive cultural commentary, or lifestyle journalism. But so far only Didion has done all four in perfect synthesis, a prose that, at its best, can fire on every cylinder and work on multiple fields of the imagination at once." In support of the Kickstarter project for the documentary on Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Nathan Heller looks back over Didion's writing career, her "imaginatively seductive" nonfiction writing and her carefully constructed confessionalism in a piece for Vogue.
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The Worst Dinner Party
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“I know what’s next— / the horns, the hymns.”
Recommended Reading: “Epistrophy” by Jake Adam York, who passed away last December.
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