Recommended Reading: On the mysterious benefactors keeping St. Mark’s bookstore alive.
Bookstore Fairy
Full Stop Blogger Call
Know some talented writers in need of a great platform? Full Stop is looking for bloggers to cover literature, film, music, politics, and a host of other topics.
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Making a Place Worth Living
“It is difficult for them to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public’s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so.” For Time magazine’s American South issue Jesmyn Ward writes about her decision to return home to Mississippi.
Complete Archive of Paris Review Interviews Available Online
Lorin Stein has made the complete archive of The Paris Review interviews available for free online. The New York Times explains why this is such fantastic news: “The first issue of The Paris Review contained an interview with E.M. Forster. The new issue contains two, with Norman Rush…and the French controversialist Michel Houellebecq. In between there have been more than 300 others, from Ernest Hemingway (as indignant as a gored bull) to Jorge Louis Borges (funny and quizzical) and Hunter S. Thompson (surely on a variety of pharmaceuticals). Nearly all are worth a look-in.”
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Reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poetry During a Pandemic
Elizabeth Gonzalez James reflects on why she finds herself reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in the midst of lockdown and how it's a salve to her feelings of confusion and frustration.
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Master Palindromist
Today’s long read begins like this: “In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet.”
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Emily Wells
If you like the music of groups like Portishead, CocoRosie, and the Cocteau Twins, you might be interested in the eerie musical dreamscapes of Emily Wells, a gifted violinist and vocalist whose work combines classical, folk, and hip hop. Here she performs “Symphony 1 In the Barrel of a Gun.”
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The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”
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“Listening feels like a weighted choice”
If you read only one take on Rihanna and Chris Brown’s latest musical (and personal) partnership, make it this one by Ann Powers.
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