The Review to End All Reviews
Graphic Pains
Over at Public Books, Jared Gardner explores the theme of pain and illness at the heart of many graphic narratives. As he explains it, “Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961).” Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions piece on the history of Marvel Comics.
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Measuring Detail Density
"Every story that works gets the level of description that it needs. Which isn’t to say that the level of description needed for every successful story is the same." Tobias Carroll surveys the wide variety of detail density in fiction for Electric Literature.
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Guns N’ Roses N’ Meth
In this piece on "Southern Enlightenment", Kevin Charles Redmon checks out John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead and Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana for The Rumpus. In the process, he touches on Axl Rose and methamphetamines.
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Imagine the Card Catalog
This is supercool: Hyperallergic reports programmer Jamie Zawinski has created a digital rendering of the library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story of the same name, which imagines an institution intended to house all potential books. You might also enjoy our 2013 piece about a discovered set of Borges lectures from a class the author taught in Argentina in 1966.
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Soda Series Tonight
The 11th Soda Series is tonight at the Soda bar in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights). The special reading and conversation will feature Susan Daitch, Brian Evenson, and Bradford Morrow.
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Recommended Reading: Americca
Recommended Reading: Aimee Bender's short story "Americca" from her newest collection, The Color Master.
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Your friendly neighborhood poet laureate
A while back, we reviewed an anthology of work by American poets laureate--that is, those appointed by the President to serve the entire United States. But there are 45 currently-serving state poets laureate, and thousands of city, county, and other poets laureate as well. What exactly do they do?