Go Jane Give organized the “#Read4Refugees” social media campaign, encouraging users to raise awareness and funds for refugee issues. Over the past month, numerous well-known authors have joined in, including Junot Díaz, Jodi Picoult, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sherman Alexie, among others.
#Read4Refugees
Aysegül Savas Pays Attention to Life
Save the Languages
Researchers at Comanche Nation College and Texas Tech University are creating a digital archive to reconstruct the Comanche language before its 25 remaining speakers die out. Meanwhile, researchers from Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences have recorded audio and video footage of twenty isolated Alaskans who speak a unique form of the Russian language. (Bonus: An Australian researcher recently uncovered a whole new Aboriginal dialect.)
A Religious Review
“POPE OF PURGATORY WOULD BE A SOLID BAND NAME.” Part two of a series in which Mallory Ortberg of The Toast reviews Martin Luther’s The Ninety-Five Theses.
Homes for Old Kindles
Tired of that ancient Kindle sitting around, gathering dust? Now you can trade it in.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frame, London, Stafford, Tennyson, Bennet
Janet Frame’s posthumous novel In the Memorial Room is out this week, as is a new e-book edition of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Also out: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems by the onetime Poet Laureate William Stafford; a new biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the latest edition of The Best American Magazine Writing.
Breece D’J Pancake’s Gravity and Triviality in Grief
At the Southern Review of Books, Justin Evans reflects on Breece D’J Pancake‘s celebrated collection of short stories from 1984, published five years after his death. “The stories of Breece D’J Pancake, by their own merit, are remarkably tied to the rural home of their author,” Evans writes. “Unfortunately, they are also tied to the author’s absence. Honestly, it’s tempting to romanticize this collection of fiction. I still have a copy of the 2002 edition that I stayed up all night reading sometime around 6 years ago. There was something about the scale of history and place against the scale of the individual, about the mix of gravity and triviality in grief that I found energizing at a time when most of my day went to physical labor.”