Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, “The white students aren’t being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop.”
Poetry Is Politics, Politics Is Poetry
Tuesday New Release Day: Aira, Wallace, Costello
New Directions releases César Aira’s The Hare this week. The novel was featured on our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview not long ago. Today also marks the release date for David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello’s Signifying Rappers, which is being re-released by Little, Brown.
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The Future of the Book (Studies)
Goucher College announced the creation of a new interdisciplinary minor this week. “Book Studies” will “explore the past, present, and future of the book,” according to the school’s administration. Regarding the “future of the book,” might we recommend our built-in syllabus?
Tuesday New Release Day: Hustvedt; Poissant; Livers; Dermont; Kirn; Butler; Kerouac
Out this week: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant; Cementville by Paulette Livers; Damage Control by Amber Dermont; Blood Will Out by Up in the Air author Walter Kirn; Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler; and The Haunted Life, a new collection of early writing by Jack Kerouac.
Last Orders
For better or worse, the publication date of Umberto Eco’s final book has been bumped up — originally set for a summertime release, Pepe Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society is now due out in Italian this weekend. Check out this Eco essay on how to travel with a salmon.
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RIP Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. The Colombian writer was a prominent novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch and won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work.
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The Perils of Book Lending
We’ve all been there, right? Your neighbor lends you a book, you don’t treat it very carefully, she complains, so you thrust a samurai sword inches from her face. It happens.
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Shakespeare’s NYC
Coming soon: short films for each of Shakespeare‘s 154 sonnets, all set in New York City.
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