Out this week: The Collected Poems of Robert Bly; Petty Theft by Nicholas Friedman; The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons: Volume 1; and The Best American Magazine Writing 2018. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Bly; Friedman; Ammons; ASME
Junot Diaz on What is a Writer
Junot Díaz writes in O. Magazine about the harrowing, doubt-and-terror-filled decade-plus he spent writing his Pulitzer-prize winning first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
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Faulkner’s Inspiration; Scholar’s Denial
Did the real-life family of Edgar Wiggin Francisco III inspire some of William Faulkner’s writing? Did a group of scholars try to suppress inquiry into the matter?
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Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
Zadie Smith’s Headed to Hollywood
It’s a big season for Zadie Smith. While most of us eagerly await the publication of her latest book, NW, the author’s earlier work, On Beauty, is set to become a feature film. Smith’s first book to be dramatized on film was White Teeth, a UK mini-series from 2002 based on her book of the same name. (And available online if you have Hulu Plus.)
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Nicole Dennis-Benn Moves Forward
Nicole Dennis-Benn discusses her latest book, Patsy, a novel that explores issues of motherhood, the working class, sexual identity, and immigration.
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