For Ploughshares, Emilia Phillips writes about “the corporeality of the lyric.” As she puts it, For some, the act of writing about the body is not necessarily the inclusion of the body as a poem’s subject but the body as the vehicle for the poem. Think of how repetition recalls movement, dancing. Think of how good a rhyme feels in the mouth.”
Writing the Body
Shame and Queerness
Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, writes on shame and queer identity. “Shame would give me the power to submit to almost anything.”
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Immigrant Song
Why are Americans so enamored by immigrant fiction but rarely read anything in translation? David Naimon and Gary Shteyngart discuss this and more in the latest Between The Covers podcast. Shteyngart's latest book, Little Failure, was part of our 2014 book preview.
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Feel Good, Inc.
"Take a quick break from the apocalyptic news and end your week with this list of books to eagerly anticipate (assuming the world doesn’t end) instead!" The Rumpus lists some books that could make you feel a little bit better.
Tuesday New Release Day: Banville, Erdrich, Petterson, Meek, Helprin, Lehane, Cisneros, Sloan, Josefson, Bertino, Ware, Paris Review, BASS, Amis
October kicks off with a mega-dose of new fiction: Ancient Light by John Banville, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson, The Heart Broke In by James Meek, In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin, Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, and Have You Seen Marie? by Sandra Cisneros. And that doesn't even include debuts Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, That's Not a Feeling by Dan Josefson, and Safe As Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino. And there's more: graphic novel master Chris Ware's Building Stories, The Paris Review's collection Object Lessons (we interviewed one of the Steins behind the book) and this year's Best American Short Stories collection. Finally, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim is out in a new NYRB Classics edition with an introduction by Keith Gessen.
The Greatest Show on Earth
“On January 14, 2017, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus—America’s oldest and best circus, America’s last true touring circus—announced that it was closing, and six days later the country mourned, with an exit parade, a grand-finale funeral: the inauguration of Donald J. Trump.” Year-in-Reading alum Joshua Cohen, whose Book of Numbers spent seven months on our top-10 list back in 2015, and whose new novel Moving Kings made our most-anticipated list for the latter half of this year, reflects on the end of an era for The Point.
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Maybe His Advice Isn’t So Great After All
You might think that the co-author of Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona would be able to partake in the Spanish city's annual event without suffering any injuries. Unfortunately for Bill Hillmann, that’s not the case.
“The 14-day Forecast says Drake too for weeks”
Recommended Reading: “Views from the 6” by Emma Healey, which will soon become the best poem you’ve ever read about Drake.
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Publishing’s Other Imbalance Problem
“The reality is, there are just not a lot of POC authors out there,” writes Ellen Oh in her essay on non-white authors. “We are not representing the 37% of our population when we only amount to 10% of publishing.”
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