Out this week: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich; Improvement by Joan Silber; Bunk by Kevin Young; Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag; and Don’t Save Anything by James Salter. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Erdrich; Silber; Young; Sontag; Salter
Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
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A National Mission
The new poet laureate of Canada wants to clue his readers in to the prevalence of poetry in their everyday lives. “People often don’t realize they’re surrounded by poetry,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “At the very least, it’s in the songs they listen to.”
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“Sing About Me”
"Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts...When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all." Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
NO MORE
The US Navy will no longer write its internal communiques in all caps. Maybe they got tired of the sense that they were constantly shouting?
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Vladimir Nabokov and “divine dribble”
Following up her post about Judy Blume’s Forever, our own Lydia Kiesling writes about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita for PEN American Center’s ongoing series for Banned Books Month. It's a book, Kiesling writes, which serves as an "exhibition of a uniquely talented person at the zenith of his powers." (This isn’t the first time she’s discussed the book, by the way.)
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DFW on Writing Nonfiction
"I'm not a journalist, and I don't pretend to be one, and most of the pieces in there were assigned to me by Harper's, with these sort of maddening instructions of, you know, just go to a certain spot and kind of, you know, turn 350 degrees a few times and tell us what you see." Tom Scocca posts a five-part transcript of a phone interview he did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998. (Thanks, Nick.)
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Dublinalia
It’s common for descriptions of James Joyce’s Dubliners to label its stories portraits of Irish life. If you’d like to look at actual portraits of Irish life in 1904, however, you could do a lot worse than this series of old photos of Dublin, available online courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute.
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