“What a miracle to find this buried treasure in the archives. To think something as good as this has been lying around there gathering dust.” An unpublished picture book by Maurice Sendak has been found, reports The Guardian; Presto and Zesto in Limboland, co-written with Sendak’s longtime collaborator Arthur Yorinks, is slated for publication next year. We revisited Where the Wild Things Are not long after the site’s founding.
Presto Manuscript
“Writers have always been whiners.”
With just a few more weeks to go until the end of the world, here’s an argument for the golden age of writing – right now.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Woodson; Korkeakivi; DeWitt; Hertmans; Hemmings; McHugh; McInerney
Out this week: Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson; Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi; White Nights in Split Town City by Annie DeWitt; War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans; How to Party with an Infant by Kaui Hart Hemmings; Arrowood by Laura McHugh; and The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
“It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian.”
You can read the first twenty pages of Karolina Waclawiak’s How To Get Into the Twin Palms – and if that hasn’t sold you yet, know this: this excerpt has some sexy stuff in it.
Treated with Vyvanse
“First, humans domesticated the horse. Then, we invented analgesia for the horses while we got rid of God—eliminating pain while also eliminating pain’s previously greatest meaning. This made a lonely universe. We partially solved loneliness by inventing smartphones, but this also created our now endless distraction—which, fortunately, can be treated with Vyvanse.” Sasha Chapin for Hazlitt on his friend Rachel, who is living with a terminal illness.
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Hey, That’s My Thought!
“Why would a poet ever plagiarize? You’re not going to get famous, and you’re really not going to get rich.” Where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin? This piece at Electric Literature examines what happens when a poet steals a line.
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A Necessary Delirium
“A dark and insane fantasy about the players large and small who populated our post-9/11 landscape, it’s not just the book we’ve maybe wanted but possibly the book we’ve needed — a strange lens to help us understand who we were, what we’ve done and who we may yet become.” Nathan Deuel reviews Mark Doten‘s The Infernal (which Adam Fleming Petty reviewed for the Millions here) for the LA Times.
In Search of the Impossible with Sabrina Orah Mark
Sabrina Orah Mark shares how her writing style evolved over the years, and how the blurring of poetry and prose gave her freedom to explore.
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Chicken-or-Egg Conundrum
Recommended Reading: This piece by Elisa Gabbert at Guernica Magazine in which she questions whether certain ideas can survive new shifts in language. It’s too bad she didn’t write it in emoji.