“But poems are not poems if they make people feel dead. I want people to feel alive – even if it is alive with grief.” The Guardian profiles poet Danez Smith about poetry; race, gender, and queerness; and their poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (a finalist for the National Book Award). Pair with: an essay on writing that gives shape and depth to victims of criminal injustice.
dear Danez Smith
2010 Best Translated Longlist
Three Percent has unveiled the longlist for its 2010 Best Translated Book Award. Roberto Bolaño, J. M. G. Le Clézio, and Orhan Pamuk all made the cut.
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Menswear and Books
Jason Diamond looks at why “books are in [such] abundant supply in the menswear world.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hannaham; Torday; Essbaum; Horack; Rubin; Landau; Hewitt
Out this week: Delicious Foods by James Hannaham; The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday; Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum; The Other Joseph by Skip Horack; The Poser by Jacob Rubin; The Empire of the Senses by Alexis Landau; and The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Bernhard and Olive Garden
“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
Why So Socialist?
Have you seen the infamous image of Obama in Heath Ledger-style Joker makeup? (Image care of Bedlam Magazine). See the artist, unmasked, at the L.A. Times.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers Headed to the Stage
The National Theater in London plans on adapting Behind the Beautiful Forevers into a stage production, reports John Williams. Don’t miss Paul Morton’s Millions interview with Katherine Boo from last year.
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