Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
Choking Hazard
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
“[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.” A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn’t nearly as much of a recluse as we’ve been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which “transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.”
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Terrible Beauty
Nobody needs reminding that Yeats was a major poet, but it can be easy to forget, a hundred years of his major work, just why his poetry has endured. In The Irish Times, Denis O’Donoghue makes a forceful case for Yeats’s relevance, arguing that “Yeats solved, or came closer than any other modern poet in English to solving, the problem that defeated so many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the claims of common speech, morally responsible, with the insisted-on autonomy of the poem.”
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The Vonnegut Review
As summer rolls around, you might way to get acquainted with The Vonnegut Review. Conceived by Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon, the review will function as a season-long project “dedicated toward reading and reviewing all fourteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.” You can participate with the Review’s Twitter and Tumblr posts by utilizing the hashtag “#VonnegutSummer.”
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“If you must write prose or poems”
Stop the presses: Morrissey maybe, might, let’s not hold our breaths yet but could possibly in fact be publishing a memoir. To be recited in front of the cemetery gates of your choosing.
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Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth
The film adaptation of Macbeth being helmed by Snowtown Murders director Justin Kurzel will star Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, reports Vulture. The movie will feature “Shakespeare’s original linguistic stylings” as well as “a visceral approach to the story including significant battle scenes,” and it is set to begin production this year.
I’m sorry but this is a terrible story. Good gosh. I thought Kleeman was supposed to represent the new avant garde. This is straight out of an undergrad fiction workshop. Plot, prose, characterization all tedious. Yet this will be the only piece of fiction many people read this week. Contemporary American lit has so much more to offer than this. Fiction can be inventive, funny, fun, emotionally resonant, edgy…alive…this has all the life of a last-minute high school English paper.
Yipes! Agreed. I’ve read a hundred pieces as time-wastingly “okay” (until that amateurish finish) as that, online, in the past year or so. Why is that particular not bad/not good thing in the NYer? I can only imagine a shrug in response.