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 Familiar Foreigner
“Familiar, well-behaved stories are dressed in nice book covers and sent to our bookstores; from there they march to our homes in an orderly manner.” On Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and how publishing understands the immigrant narrative. Pair with our review of Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.
●
●
Ghosts of Novels
It’s always disappointing when your novel fails to get published, but what if that novel were still lurking online? At The New York Times, Jason K. Friedman writes about finding the Amazon and Google links for his novel that never made it to print. “Google admits, ‘We haven’t found any reviews in the usual places,’ which in this case would be the planet Earth.” Pair with: Our own Edan Lepucki’s essay on how to cope with not selling your novel.
●
●
Give Rock and Roll Another Name
Chuck Klosterman wonders, which rock stars will historians of the future remember?
Not notable?!
A Nicholson Baker essay on Wikipedia and its pleasures (and its frustrations), has resurfaced in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
●
●
Type Setting
In a clip The Atlantic calls “technology porn for book lovers,” you can see how manuscripts became books in the 1940s.
Happy Days
In the late fifties, an old flame of Samuel Beckett, Ethna MacCarthy, fell ill and died of throat cancer in Dublin. Around this time, female voices began to enter Beckett’s work, which up until that point had featured almost exclusively male characters. Was there a connection? In a review of a new edition of Beckett’s letters, Fintan O’Toole suggests that there was. You could also read Elizabeth Winkler on the author’s bilingual oeuvre.
●
●