Recommended Reading: Over at BOMB Magazine, Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey discuss strategies for a non-interview, why they write, and poetry’s “direct utility toward experience.”
The Experience of Being Human
J.D. Salinger at Home
The new J.D. Salinger exhibit at the New York Public Library includes a hand-drawn mock-up of the minimalist book covers that accompany his works.
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Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
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Maggie Smith and Patricia Lockwood on Viral Poems
Maggie Smith discusses her new book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, and the pros and cons of having a poem go viral online.
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Mislabeled
Can writers transcend race? LaTanya McQueen argues that labeling fiction as minority gets in the way of the story at The Missouri Review blog. Also, see our essay on the racial and gender barriers in the publishing industry.
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Why Criticism Matters
“We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones. Much of it goes by the name of criticism, and in the most superficial sense this is accurate.” The New York Times approached six accomplished critics, Stephen Burns, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman to explain, in the spirit of Alfred Kazin, “what it is they do, why they do it and why it matters.”
The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
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