Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”
The End of Beauty
Justin Taylor Threepeat
Did you dig “After Ellen,” Justin Taylor’s short story in The New Yorker? How about his interview for the Page-Turner blog? Yea? Well here’s even more: Joshua Cohen talks with The Gospel of Anarchy author for Jewish Book Council.
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New Michael Robbins Poetry
The latest issue of Poetry magazine features four of Michael Robbins’s first “post-Alien vs. Predator” poems: “Big Country,” “Be Myself,” “The Second Sex,” and “That’s Incredible!” Robbins was also a recent participant in our Year In Reading series.
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Another Under-40 on “20 Under 40”
Hitherto a Benedictine of the affectless, Tao Lin offers an appealingly unhinged take on The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40 List” at Canteen.
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Origin Story
Over at JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton writes on historical interpretations of the Book of Genesis and literal readings of a text that had been interpreted as allegory for centuries.
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Let’s Get a Novelist to Write a Birth Scene Transmitted via Skype
This week, Allison K. Gibson looked into the “awkward but necessary role of technology in fiction,” and what it means to include it or overlook it in a given work of fiction. Similarly, what’s with the absence of birth scenes in literature?