“My wife likes to drive. I like to read aloud. So, she takes me places, and I take her places. It’s a match made in heaven — or at least in a Honda.” In honor of World Read Aloud Day, book critic Ron Charles writes about his love of reading out loud for the Washington Post. Pair with: an essay about the importance of reading aloud as adults.
Reading Aloud and Clear
Poems on Poems
“Of course, his word-pictures don’t define the art of poetry—nor are they meant to. In part they exemplify it; in part provide a warning that such an art eludes straightforward setting out in words.” On Horace’s and Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica.
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Moby-Dick In Pictures
Today is Herman Melville‘s birthday. This October, Tin House will be releasing Matt Kish‘s Moby-Dick In Pictures. Kish began illustrating Melville’s masterpiece in 2009 by “creating images based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition.” You can preview some of the work on the book’s designated Twitter account.
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Reasons to Read the Classics
In 1968 Italo Calvino published 14 reasons why we should read the classics, and his list still feels relevant. Pair with the Millions’s essay on, well, reading the classics.
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New Borges Editions
These new Penguin Classics editions of Jorge Luis Borges’ essays and poetry make a nice set, with the covers of each of the five books displaying a different rendering of Borges’ portrait.
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How Not to Have an Awful Panel
From the pedant to the eulogist, here are four distinct personality types that are sure to derail your literary event. While we’re at it, here’s to hoping that none of these four individuals show up to your next marathon reading.
The Kenyon Review 2013 Short Fiction Contest
What can you do for free these days? Well, for one thing, you can apply to The Kenyon Review’s 2013 Short Fiction Contest. The deadline is February 28th.
Patron Half-Elephant
Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
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