It looks like it’s a poetry kind of morning. Spring is on its way, and what better way to celebrate than with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Sun’s Shame,” a poem of death and desire … and also sunshine: “All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!”
The Fleshy School
Questioning the Score
Lucy Madison asks how the 25 National Magazine Award nominations went to 25 male writers and discovers it may be because fewer women write long-form journalism, “particularly at those publications that tend to get nominated for National Magazine Awards.”
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Creative Welding
How can we not link to this? Mickey Hess creates a mock-Millions essay in refashioning Cathy Day’s essay about “the novel problem” in MFA programs as “The Light-Bulb Filament Problem: 7 Thoughts on Academia’s Sheet Metal Crisis.” Clever response to the ongoing MFA debate or just plain silly?
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“You’re allowed to laugh.”
A new installment of #LitBeat, in which Steve Almond gives a hilarious and exuberant reading in Moscow, Idaho.
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Seventeen Years Later
“It is a darker book, I don’t deny that, but that’s the story that came to me and wanted to be told.” Seventeen years after Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy ended, the writer is releasing La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his new trilogy, The Book of Dust. Pullman also said the second volume of the trilogy of already complete, according to The Guardian. Check out our own Janet Potter on grief, books, and His Dark Materials.
Trystero Coffee
At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg has coffee with Thomas Pynchon–well, not exactly…
Trethewey Named Poet Laureate
You should get to know Natasha Trethewey, our newly minted Poet Laureate, and here are a few good places to start: The Missouri Review’s Summer 2010 interview with the poet, and Virginia Quarterly Review’s round-up of some of her poems.
Found In Translation
“I have the impression that the shelves of new releases in US bookstores are becoming more globalized. They’re still not as international as those in bookstores in Rome or Paris or Mexico City or Buenos Aires, where there is a much higher percentage of books in translation. But I think works in translation are becoming much more visible.” Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue contends that trends in publishing mean we’ll enjoy ever-increasing bounties of translated work. See also: translator Alison Anderson on “Ferrante Fever” and what a great translation adds to the original work.
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