“To get me through a 550-page collection, the stories must be very good indeed. These are.” When Lionel Shriver participated in our Year in Reading ritual several years back, she dedicated her reading diary to William Trevor, who just passed away. “Trevor’s writing is so perfect that you don’t even notice it’s perfect,” she wrote. “He mainlines pure narrative directly into your veins. The words never get in the way; the words, like their author, disappear.”
In Memoriam William Trevor
“So we baste on, birds within the oven, burned back ceaselessly into the past.”
November’s still a way’s away, so that gives you plenty of time to learn and master F. Scott Fitzgerald’s turkey recipes.
●
●
Take THAT, eBooks!
Writing for Ploughshares, Sean Bishop ranks ten poetry presses by the quality of their cover designs.
Dispatch from Spain
Over at the Literary Hub, Valerie Miles writes about the life and work of Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. His forthcoming novel On the Edge is the first of his books to be translated into English and one of the most anticipated books of 2016.
●
●
Scenes from a Marriage
Recommended Reading: Year in Reading alumna Emily Gould revisits Chris Kraus’s “cult feminist classic” I Love Dick, as it appears for the first time in the UK.
Dealing with Bros
Wendy Willis advises us on how to deal with bros like Donald Trump and Robert Bly. Pair with Greg Chase’s recent piece on understanding the Trump supporter through Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Trailer Two-fer: Brave & Cosmopolis
Two full-length trailers for much-anticipated films dropped this week. First up is Pixar’s Brave, which will hit theaters this June. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, fans get to see Robert Pattinson star as Eric Parker in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.
●
●
The End of Beauty
Recommended Reading: This essay on Jorie Graham, Modernist poetry, and the resistance of closure from The Nation. In the essay, Ange Mlinko puts Graham in league with such writers as John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel as some of the few living American poets “to have advanced a worldly, Modernist model of the poem into the 21st century.”