“The striking thing about her search for God is that she sometimes finds him. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’s second chapter, after a kind of introduction, is titled ‘Seeing.’ There are two kinds, she explains. The common variety is active, where you strain, against the running babble of internal monologue, to pay attention to what’s actually in front of you. But, she tells us, ‘there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.’ You do not seek, you wait. It isn’t prayer; it is grace. The visions come to you, and they come from out of the blue.” On Annie Dillard’s turn to silence.
Finding God by the Creek
Twitter’s Poetics, Twitter’s Bots
As Teju Cole demonstrated with his real-time ghazals (one, two, and three) this past week, Twitter is a medium ripe for linguistic experimentation. And far from being the exclusive domain of human beings, the social network can also produce “found poetry” at the behest of computer programs – a practice I recently wrote about for The Bygone Bureau. But who’s behind these Twitter bots? Over at The Boston Globe, they check in with Darius Kazemi, the 30-year-old programmer who’s made some of the most-loved accounts out there.
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Cubans, Minimalists, and Surrealists, Oh My!
A three-course feast for your eyes, dear readers: vintage Cuban movie posters courtesy of Will Schofield; minimalist book covers courtesy of Julie Oreskovich and AbeBooks; and little-known sheet music illustrations courtesy of the great René Magritte.
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Goodreads Debut Author Discussion
At Goodreads, join debut novelists Malena Watrous, Peter Bognanni, Emily Gray Tedrowe, and Sonya Chung for a meaty and candid discussion, including confessions about procrastination and the fact that we all actually really enjoy writing. Moderated by Katrina Kittle. Click here to join.
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Bond. Sixty Years of Bond.
Beth Carswell takes a look at sixty years’ worth of James Bond book designs. Which one is your favorite?
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Toni Morrison Dies at 88
Novelist of our hearts Toni Morrison died Monday night, her publisher reports, at the age of 88. Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her best-selling, groundbreaking novel "Beloved," and was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.
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Bookstore MFA
“There’s something about shopping for books where you’re open for anything. You’re faced with a wall of books, and you don’t know anything about most of them. At some point, it’s just you and the poems.” Carl Adamshick talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about Powell’s and the “bookstore MFA.” Pair with our own Janet Potter‘s essay on loving bookshops.
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IAmA Famous Book Critic
Pulitzer-prize winning book critic Michael Dirda joined Reddit and invited the internet to ask him anything; among the highlights—the worst book he’s ever read, an allusion to scoring crack for Hunter S. Thompson, and a picture of Dirda’s cat.
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