“To be able to sing under that kind of oppression I think, in a lot of ways, is the very essence of survival, of a people, of the ability to have to the hope to make something beautiful amongst so much wretchedness.” Tyehimba Jess, author of the fantastic new collection of poetry Olio, is interviewed over at The Literary Hub.
We Owned Ourselves
An Intrepid Voyage
Emma Watson’s book club will now be reading Year in Reading alumna Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which “rewards us with an expansive way of considering identity, caretaking, and freedom.”
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An Eastern Bloc Monument
Cheers to Joshua Cohen for this early look at Péter Nádas’ mind-bending magnum opus, Parallel Stories. Our own review will appear sometime in 2014, when we finish reading. (But we can already say that all 1,100-page novels should begin, as this one does, with a dead body.)
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Infographic: Summer Reads
This week in book-related infographics: Electric Literature has recommendations for summer reading, organized by location and required concentration level. Going to Italy? Try A Room with a View. Craving a tropical get-away? Read The Beach, obviously.
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Ginsberg on Williams’s Plums
The Allen Ginsberg Estate supports a regularly updated blog called The Allen Ginsberg Project. I recommend reading it. Here’s a gem of a conversation between the late poet and a student over those delicious, sweet and cold plums in William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say.”
We’re Not In the Establishment. Right, Geoff?
In The Guardian, Geoff Dyer talks about about the literary establishment and how, in particular, “unspoken assumption that [it] – whatever it is – is a bad thing.”
Inside Litball
“Bertelsmann’s 7% decline in 2016 revenue was due entirely to a drop in sales at Penguin Random House. The lack of a big new bestseller hurt results at the company, and it divested some smaller divisions in the year.” For those interested in inside baseball, Publishers Weekly takes a look at how the world’s 50 largest publishers are faring. (TL;dr: Although their total revenue topped $50 billion, more than half of the list’s publishers reported sales declines – oh, and Harry Potter still really, really sells). As a counterpoint to all that capitalism, read our own Edan Lepucki‘s survey of self-published authors.
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