Do you want to nurture your writing? Sign up for the Skillshare online class Creative Writing for All: 10 Days to a Daily Habit, taught by Friendship author and Year in Reading alumna Emily Gould and featuring a 10-day creative writing challenge. Also: enrollment is free through April 12.
Writing Every Day
The Book of Mormon, on Broadway
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and Team America World Police, are turning their wild imaginations to a new subject and a new genre: “The Book of Mormon,” a musical the duo co-wrote with Robert Lopez, will open on Broadway next year.
The Ultimate Bestseller
This week in book-related infographics: Waterstones has put together an illustrated formula for the ultimate bestseller, “a thriller tale of crime, bondage and wizardry.”
●
●
Empirical Studies of the Class System
Following the recent passing of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, The New Statesman republished the author’s London diary, first published by the magazine back in 1958.
●
●
Bard-yoncé
Beyoncé collaborated with Forrest Gander, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, to write a poem called “Bey the Light.” You can read that over here. (Bonus: This isn’t the first time Queen B has teamed up with a prominent writer.)
●
●
News That Stays News
“Yes, they believed I was a dangerous person, unpredictable, and I observed that I really scared them. Sometimes I noted that the guards looked at me as judges. Their look translated to me as ‘gorilla, stay in your cage!’ When soldiers were off-duty, they came to gawk at me with a sense of wonder. Sometime they would throw me a piece of meat or something sweet, just like to an animal. The old EZ: an exciting and fascinating sight.” Ezra Pound reflects on his time in an Italian prison.
Total Eclipse
“I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” Longreads invites us to revisit Annie Dillard‘s classic essay “Total Eclipse,” from her new collection, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.
●
●
What’s In a Name?
The practice of naming children after a dead sibling was surprisingly common up until the late-nineteenth century–Salvador Dali, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and Vincent Van Gogh were each “necroynms,” or the second of their name. Jeannie Vasco’s essay for The Believer on necronyms and grief is perfect to read alongside this essay for The Millions by Chloe Benjamin on naming not humans, but novels.
●
●
Looking for a Job? In Space?
Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It’s the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company’s actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
●
●