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
Prejudice and the Grotesque
Dave Griffith writes for The Paris Review about reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” an immigrant story set in the South, in the age of Islamophobia. Pair with Nick Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from O’Connor.
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Artisans of the Bardic Breath
A couple weeks back, Jonathan Callahan published a crackerjack essay here on Volume 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. Little did we know that, even as he was writing it, he was being interviewed about his own literary debut, The Consummation of Dirk, by none other than…Rick Moody.
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Gottlieb’s Letter
“A very proper letter (‘scrutinized and corrected by the magazine's fact checkers and proofreaders,’ wrote the Times) was sent to [Robert] Gottlieb, beseeching him to decline the [New Yorker] job,” writes Elon Green in his overview of Gottlieb’s brief stint as the magazine’s editor. How would you feel if Donald Barthelme, Deborah Eisenberg, Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Janet Malcolm, J.D. Salinger, and 148 others all told you, “don’t come” to your new job?
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“It tasted like iron and foam was coming out of our mouths”
The VQR's last issue, "The Soviet Ghost," was one of the most heart-wrenching reading experiences I've had in a long time. Now it's got a series of video interviews with Chernobyl workers to seriously depress (and also greatly inform) you all over again.
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