Eve Ewing recently released her debut poetry collection, Electric Arches, and we dubbed it one of our must-read poetry books last month. Year in Reading alum (and another Millions favorite) Kiese Laymon called her for a Guernica magazine interview and the result is a wonderful discussion on shea butter, Jordans, writing with young people as her primary audience and Assata Shakur as a literary inspiration.
Two Must Read Poets Converse
Tuesday New Release Day: Martin, Pollock, Spiotta, Ball, Weiner, Peach, Goodman
New this week is George R.R. Martin’s latest Song of Ice and Fire installment, A Dance with Dragons. Also hitting shelves: Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia (Don’t miss our preview with tons more upcoming books.) Jesse Ball, whose The Curfew has just come out, also has a new collection, The Village on Horseback. Jennifer Weiner’s new book, Then Came You, is out, as is the first issue of McSweeney’s new food magazine, Lucky Peach. Out in paperback: Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.
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The Portable Betty Draper
The literary lineage of Mad Men‘s Betty Draper extends to Edith Wharton and Margaret Mead, argues Laura Tanenbaum in a new issue of Open Letters Monthly.
You are Katniss
Ever spent the whole day reading The Hunger Games and then found yourself paranoid that a tribute was following you? Don’t worry; you aren’t crazy. Turns out that reading a really gripping novel can cause our brains to believe we are in the body of the protagonist, and this effect can last for days after reading according to a scientific study.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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And “Crude”
Over at The Atlantic Wire, Jen Doll catalogues the many words first coined by Geoffrey Chaucer, which includes such everyday staples as “dotard,” “fattish,” “caterwaul” and “twitter.”
Rear Window Through One Window
Jeff Desom created a stunning time-lapse composite of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rear Window in which you can see the events unfold chronologically from a single vantage point. More details on how Desom did it can be found on his website.
Master Palindromist
Today’s long read begins like this: “In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet.”
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Convention for the Bookish
Miss this year’s AWP? The New Yorker has published a brief write-up of the conference, just to make you jealous.
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