“I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer.” Ocean Vuong on immigrating into English and the first poem he ever wrote.
If A Boy Could Dream
Young Adult Fiction’s New Chapter
Authors Tomi Adeyemi, Akwaeke Emezi, Elizabeth Acevedo, Angie Thomas, and Nic Stone joined forces to discuss the changing tides in young adult fiction.
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Revisiting Márquez’s Speech
In December 1982, Gabriel García Márquez accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you haven’t read or heard his acceptance speech, you can now at Brain Pickings. We have a few pieces about the iconic author to pair with it.
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Who Did You Talk To
You may have read some portion of the infamous Watergate transcripts. What you probably haven’t read is quotes from the transcripts rearranged into poetry. At The Paris Review Daily, a few representative poems by Richard Nixon, including “I Can’t Recall,” “The Position” and “In the End.” You could also read our own Michael Bourne on Thomas Mallon’s book Watergate.
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Keep Hope Alive
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
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“Forsterian-by-way-of-the-Beatles”
Recommended Reading: Joanna Biggs on Zadie Smith and Swing Time, which we reviewed.
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Salon de Huh?
Mexican novelist and part-time literary prankster Mario Bellatin is up to his old tricks again. This time, the one-armed author/provocateur has decided to wage war against his own publisher. Bellatin claims the twentieth anniversary edition of his classic Beauty Salon was published too early and without his express consent–a brief “coda from the author” was included which Bellatin insists was nothing but a draft in progress. As such, he has been urging fans not to purchase his book.
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Dwight Garner on Commonplace Books
Do you jot down thought-provoking lines from books, shows, songs, and movies? Then you, too, keep a commonplace book.
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