The MFA program at Florida Atlantic University launched Swamp Ape Review, a new national online literary journal. For their first print issue, which is set to publish next year, they’re accepting submissions from writers in South Florida, such as Martin, St. Lucie, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties. For a nice primer on the journal’s namesake (or, rather, its alias), I direct your attentions to Bill Kearney.
Get Bent, Collier County.
Some New Releases: Kingsolver, Pynchon, Plath
Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Update: There’s a new edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation too.
Spring Is for Reading
It’s time again for spring cleaning, as well as the more enjoyable spring reading. Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading is gearing up for Your Face This Spring, which will read the entire 1200 pages of Javier Marías‘s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. And Big Other is orchestrating a group read of Flann O’Brien‘s At Swim-Two-Birds. After you finish a closet, open a book–both start next week.
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“My awareness and relationship with covers began nearly a decade ago.”
Craig Mod’s superb take on book cover design in the digital age, “Hack the Cover,” is really worth the read.
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The Only Real Currency
“Produce like no one is listening. Distribute like nobody’s watching. Contribute like you’ve never been hurt.” Here is lil’ sweetheart Karl Marx like you’ve never seen him before — what a romantic!
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Reading The Power in 2017
Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. “In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men.” Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it’s due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. ‘It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.’ But she adds: ‘I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'”