Out this week: Bardo or Not Bardo by Antoine Volodine; My Mrs. Brown by William Norwich; The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales; Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang; The Houseguest by Kim Brooks; and Ear to the Ground by David L. Ulin and Paul Kolsby. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Volodine; Norwich; Gonzales; Nganang; Brooks; Ulin & Kolsby
Guiding Light
In case you missed it: Google bought Frommer’s last August. Then in April, Google announced that it would stop printing hard-copy guidebooks, so founder Arthur Frommer bought his company back. All of this has led Doug Mack to argue that not only do we need guidebooks, but they should be part of the literary canon. “They also stand out for shaping history, if not always intentionally, because of their authoritative reputation—they have long been the best insight into that which would be otherwise unknown.”
CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
Sun Ra’s Avant Poetics
UbuWeb has posted an excellent collection of avant jazz and poetry from Sun Ra and his famed Arkestra. Much of the suite dates from a 1977 on-air performance in Philadelphia. (Bonus: An excerpt from “At Sun Ra’s Grave” by Jake Adam York.)
“Most of my hike was saying, this is a black body, and it belongs everywhere.”
“There is no divorcing the lack of diversity in the outdoors from a history of violence against the black body, systemic racism, and income inequality,” writes Rahawa Haile in her description of hiking the full length of the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, Haile documented her journey and the books she carried — books written by black authors. In a debrief interview, she explains her motivation: “I want[ed] to bring these books places no one likely has. I want[ed] to document where black brilliance belongs.”
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Two Tumblrs Worth Seeing
Consider these two Tumblrs as late additions to my three-part (one, two, three) taxonomy of literary blogs. Writers at Work is three years in the making, so we’re a bit late to the party, but Erasing Infinite, which creates erasure poems out of each page of Infinite Jest, looks like it’s got a long way to go before it’s finished.
Dickinson’s Self-Creation
“Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” On Emily Dickinson’s self-creation at Lit Hub. Pair with a piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of Dickinson’s poems.
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