Recommended Reading: Over at Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes about the importance of secrets for a child’s development and in children’s literature.
Secret Space
Otherworldly
No one knows quite how to categorize Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Unreality, in part because it has elements of a novel, a memoir and a long poem. The early 20th century Romanian writer chronicled his own slow death and the effect it had on his senses. At The Paris Review Daily, Andrei Codrescu writes about a reissue of the book.
Excerpted
From the book I’m reading right now: “My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood.”
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Apologizing to Strangers
For Edward Hirsch, poems tell you things about people's deep interiority that can be difficult to square with their public personae when you meet them.
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“My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.”
“If [Langston] Hughes and Cullen were competitors, of sorts, for the prize of principal African American poet of their generation, Cullen may have had an early lead, and during the later 1920s and early 1930s they were often discussed in tandem.” At The Boston Review, Major Jackson takes a look at the career and legacy of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.
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Junot Diaz on What is a Writer
Junot Díaz writes in O. Magazine about the harrowing, doubt-and-terror-filled decade-plus he spent writing his Pulitzer-prize winning first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.