Experience Claudia Rankine’s sound and fury in a new poem in The New Yorker. Pair with a piece on why Americans love poetry, but not poetry books.
New from Claudia Rankine
David Mamet Appliance Center
The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.
Hanif Abdurraqib on Writing to Survive the World
Abdurraqib discusses his new essay collection, A Little Devil in America, a celebration of Black culture through the lens of artists like Josephine Baker, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, and more.
●
●
●
Every height of brow
Putting aside for a moment the racist phrenological roots of the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” here’s an interesting conversation on what the difference between them means for literature now. For a historical take, check out this graphic from a 1949 edition of LIFE magazine, which taught me a real gentleman wears fuzzy tweed, and iceberg lettuce is never in style.
●
●
Counter-revolutionary
It goes without saying that a man dubbed “the father of modern conservatism” might stir up contentious debates. In his heyday, Edmund Burke was so renowned as a thinker that his detractors tried to place him at the center of conspiracy theories. In a new biography, Jesse Norman tackles Burke’s thought in its entirety — a task which, in Charles Hill’s view, is nothing if not un-Burkean.
●
●
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Turns 75
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop turns 75 this year. To celebrate, a number of alumni are writing essays on their experiences for various blogs (as well as ours!) as part of The 75th Project. At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kevin Brockmeier has comprised “A Chronological List of Statements People Made to Me at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1995-1997.” Additionally, Joyelle McSweeney has a piece on n+1‘s website entitled “Iowa Occult: a Mütter Pedagogy; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Vomit Art.”
Delaney Nolan Photographs New Orleans
I’m thinking about installing a Delaney Nolan bat signal to alert the world of her new work whenever it appears. Previously I’ve evangelized about her writing in Guernica, Necessary Fiction, Sundog Lit, and The Rumpus, but this time I’d like to call attention to her photo essay about New Orleans in the latest issue of Oxford American.
A Voice of Gravitas
Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay on pandering has gotten a lot of responses, including one from Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James. Over at NPR, they discuss the issues of sexism and racism in publishing, cultural ventriloquism, narrative authority, and more.