Recommended Reading: A conversation between Year in Reading alumna Rebecca Makkai and Louise Erdrich at The Chicago Review of Books. You could also read our interview with Makkai following the release of The Hundred-Year House.
Becoming What You Write
Susie DeFord’s Dogs of Brooklyn
Poets, dog-lovers, urban-dwellers, and really, everyone -- check out poet and dog-trainer Susie DeFord's heartfelt and keen-eyed new book of poems, Dogs of Brooklyn. Says Vijay Seshadri, DeFord's collection is full of "wonderful poetic investigations into the life of Brooklyn's dogs, into their habits, their idiosyncrasies, and their secret longings."
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More Money More Problems
Spend too long in Screenplay Fantasy Land, and you'll incur Screenplay Fantasy Debt.
The Modern Memoir
Recommended Reading: On the memoir, “the offspring of the slave narrative,” as a literary form from the Black tradition. Recent examples range from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margo Jefferson to Clifford Thompson and Rosemarie Freeney.
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The Sot-Weed Movie
Steven Soderbergh is interested in bringing The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth’s “750-plus-page satire of picaresque novels” – to the big, silver or computer screen. You should start getting excited about this if you’re from Maryland, interested in literature, or tickled by the word “beshit.”
Bookstore Unplugged
Apropos of our recent essay by a student hiding out in a bookstore with spotty Wi-Fi to avoid reading online, The Rumpus interviewed a bookstore and coffeeshop owner who has taken the bold step of making his establishment a WiFi-free zone. "I’ve observed and been told many times about how the availability of Wi-Fi creates a space where people are wrapped up in their own, solitary world and not interacting with each other."
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Who Wants to be a Millionaire Poet?
There's an oxymoron for you: "Rich Poet." But the new fortunes of Emirati poet Saif Al Mansouri prove that with talent, grit, and a live television audience, truly anything is possible. The UAE show "Millionaire's Poet," in its sixth season, awarded $1.3 million (the Nobel Prize. for comparison, is $1.2 million) to winner Al Mansouri, and perhaps something even more valuable - a global audience of up to 70 million, actually tuning in.
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