Lorrie Moore writes about her home state of Wisconsin and its popular Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer. Also check out the Millions profile of Moore.
Dispatch from Wisconsin
Stuck in Traffic
Ann Beattie tells the New Yorker how a bumper sticker inspired her short story “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowgirl.” Also check out Alex Dueben’s Millions interview with the author.
Literary Gamers
Nabokov played (and frequently wrote about) chess; J.K. Rowling plays Minecraft, though it has yet to appear in any kind of Harry Potter spin-off. And why shouldn’t she? After all, “there’s a long tradition of other authors turning to a variety of such games – mostly as light relief from their vocation, but also sometimes finding writerly inspiration.”
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Caught
“Were you happy? With Green it’s likelier you were in love, attuned to the littlest differences, rapt at eventless descriptions that should be boring but aren’t, in awe of the way a cut-rate bunch of flowers is described, interpreting each symbol as a sign, sickened when your interpretation failed.” On the novels of Henry Green.
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Constraint-Based Poetry: Round Two
I didn’t expect to find a Chinese poem more ornate than Su Hui’s palindromic, pre-oulipan “Xuanji Tu,” but apparently I underestimated myself. Here’s “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” a 92-character poem by Yuen Ren Chao which relies on the tonal variations of a single sound (shi) to tell the story of a “lion addict” with a taste for big cats. For a really crazy experience, I recommend listening to the poem being read aloud.
Rowling to Receive PEN Service Award
J. K. Rowling will receive the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award “for her efforts to fight inequality and censorship”. Rowling joins the likes of Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Tom Stoppard. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg reflects on the magic of the Harry Potter series with librarian Cynthia Oakes.
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Big Books, Big Brains
We like big books and we cannot lie. But are books just continuing to get longer and longer? A new survey of bestsellers has concluded that the average book is now 25% bigger than its counterpart fifteen years ago. The Guardian investigates. Mark O’Connell at The Millions has his own theory about long books.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rash, Gavin, Hainey
New this week: a pair of highly anticipated collections, Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash and Middle Men by Jim Gavin. Also out is Michael Hainey’s intriguing memoir chronicling his investigation into his father’s mysterious death, After Visiting Friends.