At Boston Review, check out a new poem from Maggie Nelson. At The Millions, Leslie Jamison includes Nelson’s Bluets and The Art of Cruelty in A Year in Reading.
What Kind
The Franzen Printing Error
●
●
As Good as Gold
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Golden Man Booker Prize, the one-off award celebrating the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the prize. About the prize, Ondaatje said “I wish in fact that those of us on this Man Booker list had been invited to propose and speak about what we felt were the overlooked classics—in order to enlarge what ought to be read, as opposed to relying on the usual suspects.” Read the rest of his illuminating and gracious speech over at Literary Hub.
Pen Pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the collection Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters: “‘Hasn’t it been awful?’ Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. ‘We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?’”
Steve Jobs
60 Minutes aired a great overview of Walter Isaacson‘s bestselling (yet just released today) Steve Jobs biography. The book was also reviewed by Janet Maslin for The New York Times.
“Hauntedness is a feeling.”
Wyvern is publishing a “Haunted” theme issue just in time for Halloween this year, and you have until mid-September to submit your work. “Haunting is in your bones,” Wyvern’s editors write. “You know it when you feel it, and you know it when you write it. That is what we’re looking for.”
●
●
New Zadie Smith
Recommended reading: new fiction from Zadie Smith in the New Yorker, “Escape from New York.”
Dubliners Day
In 2004, much of the literary world celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, aka the setting of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This year, we’re celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Dubliners, which our own Mark O’Connell once described as “a collection which writers of the short story form seem basically resigned to never surpassing.” At The Paris Review Daily, Skippy Dies author Paul Murray writes about his history with the book. You could also try to pass our eccentric James Joyce quiz.
●
●