In his 2015 Year in Reading, Garth Risk Hallberg told us about Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, a quasi-poem/novel/memoir which “you will quickly forget is weird as hell, because it is also beautiful as hell, moving as hell, and funny as hell.” Though the book isn’t slated for stateside release for another few months, there is a fantastic review over at the London Review of Books that’s well worth the read.
Grief Is The Thing
Manuscript Shopping
A new Dr. Seuss manuscript has been discovered “stuffed in a 1962 issue of TV Guide.” Ruben Bolling (of Tom the Dancing Bug) has What Pie Should I Buy?, a story based on the author’s shopping list, at Boing Boing.
Colson Whitehead on Making Eccentric Ideas Plausible
On Translating Robert Walser
The Quarterly Conversation interviews Susan Bernofsky, gifted translator of Robert Walser (whose Microscripts are due out this month.)
Literary Paper Dolls
What better way to celebrate pioneering women writers ranging from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Edith Wharton than with a collection of literary paper dolls?
Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the Rhythms of Grief
Lynne Tillman Doesn’t Write About Art
Pale Fire
You can’t write about Robert Lowell without writing about mental illness — the poet went through many stretches of mania and psychosis in his life. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reads a “medico-biography” of Lowell, which takes a full measure of his lifelong illness and its consequences.