“How easy for the waterfall to turn back / into the river, the long, silent face / holding all that has passed through it / as though untouched…” A new poem from Charif Shanahan at Lit Hub, “Wanting to Be White,” forces the audience “to reconsider poetics and race, distinct yet indivisible in the American grain.” Not a fan of poetry? Check out our list of ten poems for people who hate poetry.
Wanting to Be White
Saeed Jones on Creating Change
Poets and Writers sits down with Year in Reading alumnus Saeed Jones to talk writing, publishing, and BuzzFeed. "Creating change is about having a critical mass of several influences, but one is the right people, and creating a space where people feel that they can speak up and have these conversations and experiment."
●
●
A Hunger Games Odyssey
The team behind the film adaptations of the Hunger Games trilogy have chosen their next project, and it's not another hip YA series. Instead they're going back to the classics and adapting, what else?, The Odyssey.
●
●
Who Should Readers Root For In The Super Bowl?
Need a team to root for during today’s Super Bowl? Might I suggest cheering on the team that represents a city angling to become America’s second UNESCO City of Literature? (Related: A few months back, Krakow, Poland, became the seventh city to join the UNESCO bunch.)
●
●
“Signs and Symbols” For Teh Internets
"If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not!... Still farther away, great mountains of data mining sum up, in zeroes and ones, the ultimate truth of his being." KA Semënova updates Nabokov's short story "Signs and Sumbols" (and works by other famous Russian authors) for McSweeney's, "teh internets" and the digital world.
●
●
Ugly Mugs
Recommended Reading: Walker Rutter-Bowman on Arthur Bradford’s Turtleface and Beyond. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book.
●
●
An Animated Bradbury
"You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. ... The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing." Recommended viewing: an animated interview with Ray Bradbury.