“She was to me and so many poets an exemplary and inimitable figure. And I mean to emphasize the tension between ‘exemplary’ and ‘inimitable’—what her example taught us was the necessity of going our own way, of being one with others.” Ben Lerner remembers C.D. Wright, who passed away earlier this week.
One With Others
Covers That Were; Covers That Could’ve Been
Sean Manning of the Talking Covers blog spoke with a bunch of authors, editors and artists to take a long, close look at the work of Lorraine Louie, the designer “who came up with the uniform, De Stijl layout” of the inimitable Vintage Contemporaries. And while on the topic of book covers, check out Tammy Fortin’s “New Covers for Old Classics” series she put together for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Marketing Creativity
Tim Parks writes at NYRB about the constraints that the marketplace puts on writers’ creativity. For more on publishing and the marketplace, check out our column on The Future of the Book.
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Down Goes the Stout
In what was surely one of the most fun experiments of all time, a team of Irish scientists have finally figured out why Guinness stout bubbles fall instead of rise.
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Title Games
Penguin is celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year. How well do you know its classic book covers? At The Telegraph, a quiz on the better-known titles in its library. You could also look back on one of our book cover battles.
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“History is filled with irony”
Casey N. Cep ponders oppositional forces at work on two statues harkening back to the days of Maryland’s slaveholders. “More than tragedy or romance, history is filled with irony,” she notes.
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Welcome to Wild West Egg
You are hotshot Nick Carraway in the 8-bit Nintendo version of The Great Gatsby. Don’t ask questions…just click “z” to shoot.
Testimonies
At the LARB, Millions contributor Nathan Deuel reviews Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball, which we covered as part of our Great 2014 Book Preview. Nathan calls the novel “daring and odd” and notes that, as the plot advances, “even we readers become slightly shaky witnesses.” You can learn more about Jesse Ball’s work in our own Janet Potter’s review of his novel The Curfew.
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