Beautiful, shimmer, jetty. Poets Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Robert Pinsky et al. tell Merriam-Webster about their favorite words. Related, and far less pretty: the most-looked-up words post-election include fascism, bigot, and xenophobe.
Here Refrain
Young and Old
After Herzog came out, Saul Bellow began the slow transformation from young Bellow into old Bellow, from the critically adored but little-known writer to the Nobel Prize winner whose views were solicited on every topic. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about a new biography of the author, which tackles his early career. Related: our own Emily St. John Mandel on Bellow’s novel The Bellarosa Connection.
#OccupyGaddis
Over at the LARB blog, Lee Konstantinou is heading up a summer reading group for William Gaddis’s J R. To participate, just tag your tweets or Tumblr posts #OccupyGaddis.
●
●
Party in the City Where the Book Fair’s On
South Florida readers! Assuming you’re done voting by now, you should make next week’s Miami Book Fair International a priority. Afterward, you can go celebrate thirty years of Books & Books, the jewel of Coral Gables. (And perhaps to warm up for it all, you can read my review of Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood.)
The Spy Who Saved Me
How did Ian Fleming come up with James Bond? It’s easy to think, considering the political context of his era, that Fleming tailored his superspy to be the ideal hero of the Cold War. Yet there’s another, more prosaic explanation — was the author simply having a midlife crisis?
●
●
Requiescat in pace, TriQuarterly
TriQuarterly, the long-running trail-blazing literary journal more or less dreamed into existence by the late Charles Newman, is apparently no more, due to budget cuts at Northwestern University. Newman’s foreword to his first issue as editor, reprinted at A Public Space, should be required reading for anyone thinking about the purpose and future of the little magazine and its role in the artistic ecology.
●
●
Modern Anxiety
“I think dystopian novels are really about present anxiety, aren’t they?” Chang-rae Lee said in an interview for the Daily Beast’s “How I Write” series. His dystopian novel, On Such a Full Sea, was part of our 2014 book preview.
●
●
Oxford Marginalia Group
Recommended reading: Lauren Collins writes for The New Yorker about the Oxford University Marginalia group and the fate of bookish scribblings.
●
●