“The older I get, the more my own boundaries seem to be fading, which is terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.” For The Paris Review, Lucie Shelly interviewed Lauren Groff about nature, spirituality, and her newest collection, Florida. (Our review called the collection “startling and precious.”)
Searching for Florida
The Future Is Now
Back in 2013, Ted Gioia wrote a piece for The Millions about an old sci-fi novel that correctly predicted the future. Since then, he’s embarked on an ambitious project that expands on his interest in sci-fi, exploring how the most radical sci-fi writers of the sixties paved the way for much of modern fiction. As he puts it, “I focus on this era in the history of sci-fi because it laid the groundwork for one of the most important developments in current-day fiction.”
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Last Call for MPWs
Last November, the University of Southern California announced that it would stop offering a Masters in Professional Writing, ending a program that counts Richard Yates and Hubert Selby, Jr. among its faculty alumni. At The Nervous Breakdown, Aram Saroyan (son of William) looks back on his time as an instructor.
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Musa Okwonga Does Not Strive to Be Universal
Author and poet Musa Okwonga discusses In the End, It Was All About Love, a book that required him to be comfortable with the unknown.
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Lost and Unpublished T.S. Eliot Prose to be Collected and Published
Scholars estimate that since T.S. Eliot’s death in 1965, “roughly 90 percent of his prose has been out of print and unavailable to literary scholars.” That will change this year with the publication of the first volume in Ronald Schuchard’s eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot.
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Rick Moody, Life Coach
“This seems to me the much more complex human truth … that for every theorist of the physical, as with every brainless brawler out in front of a tavern, there is a spot in him in which he aspires to the spirit. Always the flickering of the spiritual in which we reach for better. This is the ambition that changes those who aspire to it.” Here is the latest installment in The Literary Hub’s brave, groundbreaking series “Rick Moody: Life Coach.” This week finds Moody urging his reader along a path of nonviolence. Last time he took on crying.
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Reading Lolita on Tumblr
“[I]t becomes an act of subversion, an act of catharsis.” Plougshares has a piece about the Lolita aesthetic on Tumblr. See also: our conversation with John Gall who, as art director for Vintage and Anchor books, was responsible for at least two Lolita covers, not to mention the redesign of the entire Nabokov catalog.
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Bearded Bards
Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (of “Literary Pets” notoriety) is the author of the new book Poets Ranked by Beard Weight. To celebrate its publication, 50 Watts‘ Will Schofield has posted some of his favorite excerpts.
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