“Over four seasons, ‘Younger’ became a ‘Gossip Girl’ for the publishing industry—a glossy, winking take on a bounded universe of writers and editors and marketing campaigns.” If you need a show and love literary references, Younger might be the way to go.
xoxo Liza
Inside Litball
“Bertelsmann’s 7% decline in 2016 revenue was due entirely to a drop in sales at Penguin Random House. The lack of a big new bestseller hurt results at the company, and it divested some smaller divisions in the year.” For those interested in inside baseball, Publishers Weekly takes a look at how the world’s 50 largest publishers are faring. (TL;dr: Although their total revenue topped $50 billion, more than half of the list’s publishers reported sales declines – oh, and Harry Potter still really, really sells). As a counterpoint to all that capitalism, read our own Edan Lepucki‘s survey of self-published authors.
●
●
Listening to Poems
At The Rumpus, Darcie Dennigan pens a strange and beautiful review of G.C. Waldrep’s new collection of poetry, Archicembalo: “I dreamt that G.C. Waldrep was offering me a tumbler of Pepsi, and amid the soda bubbles were many pills.”
●
●
Questions of Travel
Elisa Wouk Almino writes for Hyperallergic about her search for a home in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry of estrangement. As she explains it, “Over time, I’ve found that home is not always attached to place.” Pair with this meditation on Bishop’s poetry.
This Could Be Big
After winning a $100,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, what do you do for an encore? How about staging “fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates” about what the future ought to look like? How about enlisting the likes of Laurie Anderson, Samuel Delany, Rachel Kushner, and Norman Rush as ringmasters? How about having the entire thing take place in structures designed by artists José León Cerrillo and Adrián Villar Rojas? Triple Canopy‘s “Speculations” occupies MoMA’s P.S. 1 this summer
Heathrow’s Second Writer in Residence
NME journalist and Man and Boy author Tony Parsons has been named London’s Heathrow Airport’s second writer in residence. He will use his weeklong stay to research for his new book Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow. It will be released in October, and the BAA plans on distributing 5,000 copies to airport customers. In 2009, Alain de Botton served as the airport’s first writer in residence, and he used his stint to pen A Week at the Airport.
●
●
An Interview in the Worst Way
We Are Champion, a handsome new online literary magazine promulgating “what Donald Barthelme called “back-broke” sentences,” features an interview with the great Gary Lutz.
●
●
The Mirror Stage
These Lacanian jokes will have you looking in the mirror and contemplating your existence.