“I have come to realize how much I have, throughout my life, bought into the narrative of this alluring myth of personal responsibility and excellence. I realize how much I believe that all good things will come if I—if we—just work hard enough.” Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay writes for VQR Online about “The Price of Black Ambition.” Pair with our review of An Untamed State.
The Price of Black Ambition
Defending the Poet Laureate
Recommended reading: Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes “In Defense of the Poet Laureate” and about the tension that arises when poetry meets government for the new Literary Hub site.
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Digital Publishing and Changes to Copy
“Just as the written word changed the spoken word and the printed word changed the written word, so too will the digital word change the printed word, supplementing but not replacing the earlier forms of information technology.”
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Reading With Our Ears
“But was I actually reading? I regarded myself as a reader, but were these really books?” In LitHub, James Tate Hill pens an essay about reading while visually impaired and the questions it raises in a print book obsessed world. Pair with: our own Bill Morris on hearing an actor narrate his novel’s audiobook.
Lichtenstein’s Art Comes Full Circle
Full Stop editor Anna-Claire Stinebring argues that Roy Lichtenstein’s art has “come full circle” thanks, at least in part, to the popularity of Mad Men and 1960s nostalgia. Matt Weiner’s drama, after all, “explores but also glamorizes the world that produced the material for Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings.”
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The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte’s Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.
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Milord, Milady
“Is this the right time to say ‘Zounds, milady’?” A short history of Renaissance Faires.