“Can art, so often used by developers to mask the violence of displacement, instead be used to resist gentrification?” The New Inquiry reviews Streetopia, a collection of essays edited by Eric Lyle. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on gentrification in New York City.
Art and Gentrification
Hemingway’s First Short Story Unearthed
“The notebook was there, unharmed, tucked inside a Ziploc freezer bag, with ‘Sep. 8, 1909,’ written in black marker.” After Hurricane Irma passed over Key West, Florida, writer and historian Brewster Chamberlin confirmed the relic he had found in May was safe: a notebook containing the first short story by a 10-year-old Ernest Hemingway. See also: The Millions’ own Michael Bourne’s essay on Hemingway as a “Middlebrow Revolutionary.”
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Two Newly-Discovered Sappho Poems
A researcher unearthed two never-before-seen poems by Sappho. To fans of Classics and Greek poetry, this is bigger than the surprise release of Beyoncé’s secret album.
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Why On Earth
“Why on earth would you start a literary magazine?” In an essay for The New Yorker Stephen Burt offers a wide variety of answers, from promoting a new genre to promoting one’s friends. His article pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s lit mag question and answer: “What is the wider cultural influence of literary magazines? I am not sure there needs to be one.”
JJS to LARB
“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?” asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. “He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.”
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Love and Rockets, Once More
Jaime Hernandez speaks to Carolina A. Miranda about revisiting old characters, punk music, Latinx stereotypes, and his characters' origin stories.
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Great Sentences
We’ve been writing quite a bit about our favorite books from this year, but Brooklyn Magazine is going one step further and listing 2014’s best sentences.
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The Process
We write a fair amount about book covers here at The Millions, but one thing we have yet to write about is the drafting process endured by designers. Herewith, a selection of book covers that didn’t make the cut, juxtaposed with covers that did.
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