We have finally reached peak Trump. In Hart Seely’s new book Bard of the Deal, three decades of Donald Trump speeches and interviews have been reworked into what the publisher is calling a “treasury of spoken poetry.” One can only hope there’s a poem titled, “Bored With Winning.”
So Much Depends Upon Firing You
The Duty of Thankfulness
“The worst insult people hurl at adoptees is that they are ‘ungrateful’ and should ‘go back’ (to their ‘own’ countries, to their old families). That is the moment when adoption becomes a gift—because that is the moment when it becomes clear that adoption belongs to people like the adoptive parent and not people like the adoptee. We shouldn’t want our birth families, our birth cultures. We should be thankful for being taken from the mothers who bore us. This idea of gratitude can ruin thankfulness. Why should we be grateful?” Matthew Salesses writes about gratitude and luck as an adoptee, over at The Toast. You could also check out Salesses’s Millions essay on novel writing, inciting incidents, adoption, and beginnings.
Why so Serious?
Jonathan Lethem thinks his work is taken too seriously. “Well, I was just watching Richard Pryor, and he says, ‘When you’re dating a white woman, and people don’t like it, you can’t really pretend. You can’t go, “Oh, she’s not with me.”‘ ‘You write the big, ambitious books, right?’ Well, I guess they are,” he said in an interview with Salon. He also discusses being equated with Jonathan Franzen and his new novel, Dissident Gardens.
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A Note from the Author
It was probably inevitable that Rap Genius would spawn Poetry Genius, but it was not so inevitable that Junot Díaz would make an appearance on the latter. On Saturday, Díaz annotated a number of passages from his own The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, including a footnote where he says he went “buckwild.”
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e. e. cummings or YouTuber?
In honor of National Poetry Month, revisit a McSweeney’s article on whether a YouTube commenter or e. e. cummings wrote this line of poetry. Our piece on author parochialism pairs nicely.
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An unscratchable itch
After reviewing a selection of new books on Godlessness, self-described disappointed disbeliever Christopher Beha wonders if literature can fill the spiritual voids of atheism. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg also investigated a slew of New Atheist books just last year.
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