Over at the Catapult, Nicole Chung has launched a series on adoption, featuring essays by Megan Galbraith and James Han Mattson. You could also check out Matthew Salesses’s Millions essay on inciting incidents and new beginnings as an adoptee.
When We Were Young
Casting Call
“Marta Reale, 10, her smile broad, her bangs blanched, made her way to a recreation center’s doorway through the dense crowd of other children, sunlit cigarette smoke and mothers fanning themselves on the seats of scooters. Above her, more children were hanging out the window, and above them, more were crammed onto a balcony.” Jason Horowitz files from Naples, Italy for The New York Times about a casting call for HBO’s upcoming adaptation of Elena Ferrante‘s My Brilliant Friend, noting that it “has already drawn 5,000 children, the vast majority of whom have never heard of Elena Ferrante, and injected a mix of hysteria and hope into parts of Naples that are poor in resources but rich in real characters.” Pair with this piece about The Neapolitan Quartet‘s scope and impact.
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Graffiti Lit
When street art and literature combine: on “The Moving, Playful Poetry of the World’s Textual Graffiti Artists,” from Slate.
“What they are, what they should be”
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Romance Incarnate
The best way to celebrate May Day? Read Tennyson‘s “The May Queen,” become “Romance Incarnate.”
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Epic Fail In the Wall Street Journal
“Mr. [Mark] O’Connell is an intelligent and very funny writer,” says Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “But Epic Fail will also prompt you to consider how shallow—and ugly—humans can be.” (Bonus: a reference to getting pitted, just so pitted.)
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Byliner takes a book off of Amazon
Byliner, the experimental e-publisher of novella length nonfiction, had to take Buzz Bissinger’s “After Friday Night Lights” off of Amazon when the mega-seller’s price-matching algorithm tried to sell the book for nothing.
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LOLerature
“Iz in ur Goolag/Havin a sad.” LOLerature is the LOLCats for the literary set. Some of the references are pretty obscure, too. The internet is now complete.
Blazing the Path
Pultizer Prize winner for fiction (and Year in Reading alum), Viet Thanh Nguyen, speaks about writers who “blazed the path” ahead of him at The Washington Post. For all of the Pulitzer Prize finalists, head to our comprehensive list.
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