“Skipping or skimming parts of a narrative should not only be expected but encouraged, particularly if an author is writing without clarity or purpose or showing off. Life’s too short to slog through some smarty-pants attempt to demonstrate a mastery of mechanical engineering or botany.” Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes face off for The New York Times Bookends column about whether there are right and wrong ways to read a book.
Ur Doing It Rong
“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
How Many Books Are Out There?
Just how many books are out there? Google explains how it goes about counting all of the books in the world.
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Masochism and Drama
“Ghosts are just the fucked-up dead.” This interview with David Mitchell on the release of his spooky new novel Slade House is a perfect Halloween read. We interviewed Mitchell this same time last year in conjunction with the publication of The Bone Clocks.
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Poetry Machine
Villanelle Bot, a Twitter bot that composes poems in villanelle form, is publishing the automated poetry on their blog. The bot uses Twitter posts from random people, then stitches together all lines that end in certain words to form a full poem. You could also check out our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
Little Prince, Lots of Translation
This month, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic children’s book Le Petit Prince will be translated into Hassanya, a rural Arabic dialect spoken in portions of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Mali. This marks the 300th translation of the book.
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Richard Wright, 106
Richard Wright‘s 106th birthday passed this last week, and in celebration The Paris Review posted an excerpt from a 2003 remembrance. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s review of Wright’s Native Son.
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Goodbye to Naples
Recommended Reading: Year in Reading alumna Elissa Schappell interviews Elena Ferrante about feminism, friendship, and her latest Neapolitan novel. Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.
“Ah the world, oh the whale!”
“Ah the world, oh the whale!” At The Washington Times, my review of Philip Hoare’s wonderful new anatomy of all things cetacean, The Whale, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson nonfiction prize. (ECW)
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