“We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies.” This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.
An Illusion To Think So
Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, edited
Elizabeth Bishop famously exchanged letters with Robert Lowell so remarkable they were later collected and published (Words in Air). This Recording has prepared a selection of her letters to Lowell and others, including one edit focused on the year after a lover's suicide. Pair with a meditation on the relevance of Bishop's poetry at crucial life moments.
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Will the Real Borges Please Stand Up?
"The thing Borges was most skeptical about was the idea of a writer, a man, named Borges." Our own Mark O'Connell writes about Borges for The New Yorker.
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New Katherine Mansfield Story Found
While thumbing through the archives at King’s College, a graduate student uncovered four previously unknown stories by Katherine Mansfield.
Dear Colon
On the heels of all this talk of colons, Emdashes solicits open letters to punctuation marks.
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Their Own Room
Were you aware there’s a new BBC2 show about the lives of the Bloomsbury Group? There is, and it’s called Life in Squares, a reference to a quote that says the group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” In The New Statesman, Rachel Cooke sits down with the series. You could also read Alexis Coe on Virginia Woolf and Downton Abbey.
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iCat
The first feline review of the iPad is in. According to Iggy the cat, the game Noby Noby Boy and the Magic Piano iPad ap are quite enjoyable (c/o Kotaku).
RIP Mavis Gallant
The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. A frequent New Yorker contributor, Gallant published two novels and ten volumes of short fiction in her lifetime, one of which, Home Truths, won the Governor General’s Award. The Globe and Mail's obituary describes her as having “a journalist’s nose, a cinematographer’s eye and a novelist’s imagination.” (Andrew Saikali wrote about Gallant for The Millions back in 2008.)
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