It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the “Ted Wilson Reviews the World” series over at Electric Literature. This week, he takes on everyone’s (least?) favorite confection — sprinkles. Unsurprisingly, sprinkles score a bit higher than Anxiety did a couple weeks ago: “Sprinkles can take an ordinary cupcake and turn it into a cupcake that looks like a rainbow shattered and fell all over it, and then the leprechaun at the end of that rainbow hid inside the cupcake and the only way to get him is to eat it.”
Not To Be Confused With Sparkles
Rethinking Motherhood
This motherhood book list ranges from Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born to Ada Limón's The Carrying.
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Kirkus Announces New Prizes
Kirkus Reviews is launching a new literary prize this year with a hefty purse and an even more eye-catching process. Instead of relying on publishers or judges for a longlist, they’ll automatically nominate any book that wins a Kirkus Star—about 10 percent of those reviewed—and award three annual prizes of $50,000 to the best fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. But the big news is that self-published books will also be eligible.
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Solitary Reader
Rebecca Solnit writes on loneliness, intimacy, and writing in The Faraway Nearby. Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed the book at The Millions.
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Books for a Post-‘Game of Thrones’ World
What should you read to get your Game of Thrones fix now that the TV series is over? N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kirstin Downey for starters.
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For the Viral Good
As you may have heard, Twitter went public last week, which means a lot of people are trying to figure out just what its IPO means for social media. Over at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel proposes that social media, by its very nature, cannot be profitable, and thus should be administered by the state as a public good.
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A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
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