Year in Reading alumna Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey will be writing a comic book series for Marvel alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Black Panther companion series will be titled World of Wakanda.
New Black Panther Comic
Wimmer on Bolaño
Year in Reading alum Scott Esposito asks fellow Year in Reading alum Natasha Wimmer nine questions about Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich.
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Pale Fire
You can’t write about Robert Lowell without writing about mental illness — the poet went through many stretches of mania and psychosis in his life. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reads a “medico-biography” of Lowell, which takes a full measure of his lifelong illness and its consequences.
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The View from Out Here
“Sometimes I fear that Midwestern authors are seen from a similar vantage point: that many of us are ‘fly-over writers’ to whom readers wave (or just ignore completely) as they make their way to Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek and Marilynne Robinson. I fear that these bigger names, along with a few others (Charles Baxter, Lorrie Moore), are seen as exceptions to the general rule that little of cultural worth grows in this flat, middle stretch of the country.” On the plight of the literary Midwesterner.
“The truth of poetry is not the truth of history”
Philip Levine is the current US Poet Laureate, and that’s great, but wouldn’t we all rather live in this alternate world fashioned by The Onion?
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Reading The Power in 2017
Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. “In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men.” Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it’s due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. ‘It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.’ But she adds: ‘I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'”