Recommended Reading: Poet David Biespiel writes for The Rumpus about his early education as a poet and discovering that language can never be neutral.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The Unwritten Novel
Recently, we featured five writers' reminisces about the novels they ultimately shelved. Here a sixth, Elmo Keep, explains what led her to throw away her first novel, quite outside considerations of craft:"I could not resolve the conflict of a story that was not mine."
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It Becomes Your Dream
"All of your life, you think of that one fluid motion of power, terrorized by the fact we are capable of such collisions, such harm, such leveling of each other to flattened mountains, left to tunnel into ourselves, such wretched unhappiness, such unfathomable cruelty unless resurrected by the tenderness and affection of a lover, by kisses that leave us enthroned." Major Jackson is next up in the Kiss series from Guernica Magazine -- a weekly column which investigates that most intimate of human interactions, the kiss, in all its many manifestations.
Favorite Debuts
Tin House assembles a panel to name its favorite debut novels and collections of the year. Swamplandia! and We the Animals get tapped, but some lesser known titles also make the cut.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Frame, London, Stafford, Tennyson, Bennet
Janet Frame’s posthumous novel In the Memorial Room is out this week, as is a new e-book edition of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Also out: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems by the onetime Poet Laureate William Stafford; a new biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the latest edition of The Best American Magazine Writing.
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Do You Really Want That Literary Prize?
Researchers have determined that "winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.” So if you’re very sensitive, take some solace in the fact that you haven’t won a major award, I guess.
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Dōmo arigatō, Charlie Brown
BOOM! Studios will release a graphic novel about Charlie Brown and his friends traveling to Japan entitled It's Tokyo, Charlie Brown!
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