Recommended Reading: Against crowdfunding websites that marketize goodwill.
The Economy of Goodwill
Book Learnin’
“This is the first time that the college has embarked on such a robust process for measuring Core Educational Competency In Reading Things In Books And Writing About Them, and we really can’t do it without your mandated participation. We have devised this rubric in consultation with the Office of Institutional Research About the Institution, which tirelessly gathers data and then enters it into spreadsheets. Please see their Statement of Very Worthy Goals in attachment 6.”
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Spokane 2.0
“There are so many cool things going on in Spokane now that I have this overwhelming urge to attend a tractor pull.” Jess Walter has written an addendum to his essay “Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington.”
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Still Neglected
In 1970 The American Scholar published a list of works that “distinguished men and women” deemed neglected. Now, inspired by a LitHub essay on “10 Great Writers Nobody Reads,” the Scholar‘s editors are revisiting those neglected books to see if anything’s changed. Pair their efforts with Claire Cameron‘s look at the unlikely rise of the once-neglected Stoner.
Maya Angelou in the Kitchen
Maya Angelou's underrated cookbooks are as vibrant as her more prominent work.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
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Elif Batuman on Reading the Russians
Essayist and Russian literature scholar Elif Batuman in an interview with the Boston Globe on how the Russians get the combination of “funny and sad” better than the Germans, the English, or the French.
Medium Vice
Year in Reading alum Maud Newton has a new short story up on Medium. Titled “Nobody’s Stranger,” the “Miami noir love story” somewhat wonderfully features a bar, “the most incongruous bar in Little Haiti,” in which the patrons are mostly “aging emo kids and British soccer fans and overweight burlesque enthusiasts.”
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