Meet Eunice Waymon, who Nina Simone was before she became Nina Simone. John Lahr reviews What Happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light. Pair with Bill Morris’s piece on the Hollywood biopic.
Meet Miss Simone
Goodreads Choice Awards
Make sure you vote for the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards! (And make sure you join our Goodreads group afterwards!)
That’s So Miami
The organizers of this year’s O, Miami Poetry Festival are holding an online poetry contest entitled “That’s So Miami.” To participate, submit a poem that begins or ends with the phrase, “that’s so Miami.” Entries – which can be culled from both Twitter and Instagram – are accepted in English and Spanish (duh), and submissions are posted daily on the organization’s new Tumblr. For a rundown of the festival’s other April events, check out their Facebook page.
Chabon and Waldman Go HBO
Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are teaming with Darren Aronofsky on an HBO pilot, Hobgoblin.
Clickity Clack
Where did Modernism come from? Did it spring from the alienation engendered by the nineteenth century? Or did it spring instead from — as Hannah Sullivan argues in her new book, The Work of Revision — the typewriter?
Careless Drivers
Can’t keep track of who is driving which car in The Great Gatsby? Pop Chart Lab made a chart of the comings and goings of the novel’s characters via trains, cars, and feet.
Magical Thinking
After five years, Lev Grossman has released the final book in his Magicians trilogy, aptly reviewed in the Sunday Times by our own Edan Lepucki. At Slate, the Awl cofounder, Year in Reading alum and novelist Choire Sicha looks back on the series as a whole. After reading through all three entries, Choire poses a simple but hard-to-answer question: is main character Quentin truly the central figure of the books? It might also be a good time to read our interview with Grossman.