Recommended Reading: On the work of Aleksandar Hemon and how literature helps us cope.
A Literary Pathway
I Sanction This
Talk about built-in irony: the class of tricky words known as “contronyms” can mean the opposite of what you think they mean.
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Ishiguro’s Box
The University of Texas at Austin has recently acquired Kazuo Ishiguro’s archive. The collection reveals early drafts, a pulp Western novel that Ishiguro thought had been lost, and his early attempts at songwriting. “For many years,” he said, “I’ve been in the habit of keeping a large cardboard box under my desk into which I throw, more or less indiscriminately, all papers produced during my writing that I don’t want to file neatly and take into the next stage of composition: earlier drafts of chapters, rejected pages, scraps of paper with scribbled thoughts, repeated attempts at the same paragraph, etc.”
New Directions in The Coffin
The Coffin Factory, a “magazine for people who love books,” interviews New Directions’ Barbara Epler and Tom Roberge about “publishing and finding bold, new experiments in literature from around the world.” (via)
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Populist Poetics
“What happens when everyone’s a poet?” asked Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review. Now, Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula debate what that popularity might actually mean for contemporary poetry.
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The Size Queens release iBook/Album “To The Country”
The Size Queens re-conceptualize the album with their release of To The Country, a hybrid iBook/album whose “interpenetrations of song, text, and image” aim to generate new narrative forms. Band member/author Adam Klein writes: “We create these imagined worlds together, simultaneously uncontaminated and corrupted, through metaphor and code. ‘The country’ and the new world of applications are always polyvalent; it is impossible to make them remain at our service.” Also! This textual/aural collaboration features original stories by Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Maria Bustillos, and Joy Williams (first line reads: “Daddy didn’t want to be a social being and he didn’t want us to be social beings so here we are.“) Download To The Country here (it’s free!) and read/listen/weep.
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A Flock of Pages
“Every one of these books is a herd of animals.” The Atlantic reports that a group of archaeologists and geneticists in the UK have used mere crumbs of parchment to study the DNA of several thousand-year-old illuminated manuscripts, the pages of which were made of cow and sheep skins.
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