Over at Entropy, Laura A. Warman writes about queer poetics and the politics of the body in poetry performances. As she puts it, “Can we be a body that is constantly obscured?” Pair with this Millions essay on poetry performances.
Vanishing on the Stage
“Nature” Is What We See–
"[Emily] Dickinson is often portrayed as some white gossamer recluse, completely divorced from the world outside her bedroom—but that is not really true. The physical circumference of her adult life was small, but its psychological terrain was boundless." This piece explores the ways in which Emily Dickinson's work was shaped by her skills as a gardener and naturalist.
Moby-Dick In Pictures
Today is Herman Melville's birthday. This October, Tin House will be releasing Matt Kish's Moby-Dick In Pictures. Kish began illustrating Melville's masterpiece in 2009 by "creating images based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition." You can preview some of the work on the book's designated Twitter account.
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Vote for The Millions at 3 Quarks Daily
Hey look, several pieces of ours are in the running to win 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prizes! On their voting page, you can cast your ballot for James McWilliams’s piece on Faulkner, our own Hannah Gersen’s appreciation of Friday Night Lights, or our own Nick Ripatrazone’s essay on teaching English, among other nominees.
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The Long Road
On the occasion of the publication of his novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse writes about the decades-long path that got him there and the rules for writing that he devised. (Thanks, Steve)
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The Quality of No Qualities
The new book Robert Musil and the NonModern offers David Winters a chance to revisit The Man Without Qualities. (While you're at it, check out the essay on literary theory Winters wrote for us in September...and Matthew Gallaway's piece on Musil from January.)
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Another Under-40 on “20 Under 40”
Hitherto a Benedictine of the affectless, Tao Lin offers an appealingly unhinged take on The New Yorker's "20 Under 40 List" at Canteen.
The Many Lives of Yoram Kaniuk
“After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died.” Nicole Krauss remembers her relationship with Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, author of The Last Jew, in her obituary for The New Yorker.
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