Recommended Listening: A 1961 BBC interview with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Pair with our review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life.
Hughes and Plath Interviewed
On Goodreads, On Good Criticism
"Goodreads lets me capture and disperse impressions that occur as I read. I tend to track the sounds I make when reading, the chortles, gasps, growls, and LOLs. I try to figure out why I might not have liked aspects of a book, looking under the hood in a workshoppy way..." Lee Klein offers a defense of Goodreads and good criticism over at Full Stop.
The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.
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Bold and Messy
Over at Full Stop, Josephine Livingstone writes about Eileen Myles’s hip image and the renewed success of Chelsea Girls. Also check out Stephanie LaCava’s Millions essay on how social media helped to push Myles’s book into the mainstream.
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Lots of Chutzpah
Recommended Reading: Here's some helpful advice we all could use -- how to raise a mensch: "Less obvious but equally central values that Marjorie Ingall highlights include having a healthy distrust of authority. Jews come from a vertiginously long tradition of 'questioning, yammering, challenging and disputing,' she writes. 'The Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law, is pretty much a bunch of dudes contradicting one another. Each page is a big box of text in the middle, and wrapped around it like a frame is lots of ‘Wait, you think what?’ '"
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Who Wouldn’t Want to Retire Here?
A retired Japanese couple has teamed up with an architecture firm to design “a house with a bookshop and a café where neighbors and visitors can stop by.” The result is a decidedly more spacious and well-lit version of Brazenhead Books – another domicile/bookshop.
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