It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the “Albums of Our Lives” series over at The Rumpus. This week finds Ray Shea taking a look at The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree.
Consider the Tetrapod
Art Like Reading a Good Book
Erica Baum uses found language and blackboards as her canvases. “Looking closely at Baum’s work to intuit such realities is both challenging and rewarding like reading a good book.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smith; Campbell; Moore; Brooks; Marra; Ōe; Niffeneger
Out this week: M Train by Patti Smith; Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore; The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe; and Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Audrey Niffenegger. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Where Words Go
Recommended Reading: Jenny Diski on our lost words. “So I had a thought about writing a book for the elderly, the old. Those who have lost their words more comprehensively than the friends around our lunch table, but haven’t lost themselves entirely. A book about where all the words go, where after a time they find the others and collaborate to make sentences.”
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Writing the Body
Recommended Reading: E.V. de Cleyre explores the presence of the body in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.
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A Forgotten Classic of the Harlem Renaissance
Almost 90 years after it was written, Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay is getting a chance to reach wider audiences thanks to Penguin Classics.
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Big Budget Brontë Biopic in the Works
All three Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – will be the subject of a new “blockbuster biopic,” reports Telegraph & Argus. An announcement about the cast and crew will be made on April 21, 2016 – the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth date – but early speculation indicates that Harry Potter star Rupert Grint may play Branwell.
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Hemingway’s First Short Story Unearthed
“The notebook was there, unharmed, tucked inside a Ziploc freezer bag, with ‘Sep. 8, 1909,’ written in black marker.” After Hurricane Irma passed over Key West, Florida, writer and historian Brewster Chamberlin confirmed the relic he had found in May was safe: a notebook containing the first short story by a 10-year-old Ernest Hemingway. See also: The Millions’ own Michael Bourne’s essay on Hemingway as a “Middlebrow Revolutionary.”