Look, we get it. You’re as sad as the rest of us that Frank Ocean’s new album didn’t actually drop on Friday. Luckily, there’s a fantastic essay over at The Atlantic which examines Ocean in the context of Harper Lee and the myth of the reclusive artist: “Channel Orange, like Mockingbird, is an unapologetic masterpiece for people defining themselves at the intersection of lived experience and possibility.”
Boys Might Cry
Sell! Sell! Sell! (And Write, Too!)
Moleskine, the company responsible for the iconic writing pads favored by Ernest Hemingway and Vincent Van Gogh, is planning to launch a public stock offering next September.
New Hughes
A previously unpublished short story by Langston Hughes is now available online at The New Yorker. Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson’s staff pick, Tambourines to Glory.
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Indie Road Trip
Something to do with those last remaining days of vacation: go on a national indie bookstore tour, as designed by Chin Music Press.
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Back for More
Last week, I mentioned Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, which caused a stir in Germany with its tale of a time-hopping Hitler. Now, Daniel Torday reviews the book for the Times, judging it both for its historical research and its merits as a work of fiction. Sample quote: “The German public’s acceptance of the artist they think they’re watching provides a critique of pop culture. But it feels like bringing the Luftwaffe to a knife fight.”
The Great Gadsby
“The entire manuscript was written with the E-type bar of the typewriter tied down; thus making it impossible for that letter to be printed. This was done so that none of that vowel might slip in, accidentally; and many did try to do so!” Abe Books tells the tale of Gadsby, a self-published 50,000-word novel written without using the letter “e.” Its author, Ernest Vincent Wright, won some notoriety when he accomplished the feat – called a lipogram – in 1939, although it’s unlikely Wright could have foreseen that individual copies of his book would eventually fetch prices upward of $1,200. And if it’s literary hijinks you’re after, definitely read our own Anne Yoder on the work of Georges Perec, who wrote a lipogram of his own in 1969.
A Convergence of Cowboys
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sean McCoy reports on the 35th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and tells you everything you didn't know about the history and aesthetics of cowboy poetry.
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