“[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.” A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn’t nearly as much of a recluse as we’ve been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which “transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.”
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
The Man Who Clothed the World
“No one took this further, with more imagination and daring…At a time when American groups would often dress down—affluent suburban kids disguised as Appalachian farmers or Canadian lumberjacks – Bowie quite deliberately dressed up.” David Bowie’s sartorial legacy.
The Spivet App
Always pushing the envelope in terms of how we think about books, Reif Larsen has just announced an iPad app for his novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. As the demo video suggests, this something with much more depth and interaction than just a simple port from print to digital.
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Claire Vaye Watkins Takes Home the Dylan Thomas Prize
Kudos to Claire Vaye Watkins for taking home the Dylan Thomas Prize! Worth £30,000, the prize went to Watkins because, in the words of of the chair of the judging panel, she possesses “some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form.” (Read more about Watkins’s work in Geoff Mak’s review of her 2012 book Battleborn.)
On Cocktails, Camaraderie, and Chaos
Times drink columnist Rosie Schaap discussed Drinking With Men in the pages of The Observer. Meanwhile, Derek Brown has some advice for bartenders across the country: for the love of all that is holy, stop inventing so many new, wild drinks!
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Plotting The Booker: An Infographic
Are you writing a novel about an escaped tiger? (They’re quite popular these days.) Well, if you hope to win the Booker prize, you’d increase your odds by 1,300% if you switched your theme to “death.”
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Burning Stephenie Meyer
While millions of teenage girls and grown women (see the Twilight Moms blog if you don’t believe me) wait with bated breath for the November 20th premier of New Moon (see the preview here), the film version of the second installment of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight series, some less satisfied readers are making movies of their own–movies in which they beat, burn, and otherwise insult copies of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. See Burn, Twilight, Burn!, Twilight Burning, with Techno, The Twilight Chainsaw Massacre, Twilight Baseball. And that’s only for starters. I also like this one, Twilight Burning Party, in which two spunky Ghost World-y young ladies, Cassi and Angel, do a little stand-up literary critique before burning the book.
How to Get Diversity in Publishing
Literary Hub has an excerpt of an essay by Chris Jackson, Editor in Chief of Random House’s One World imprint on how we can actually achieve diversity in the publishing industry. “What’s the payoff of having a more diverse workforce? Well, there’s obviously the moral case to be made—and that’s a case that I think applies to any industry. But in book publishing, I think we have a special obligation, given our central role in shaping the culture.” And he shares the origin story of how he started to work with Ta-Nehisi Coates.