For Garden and Gun, poet Jericho Brown discusses how the push and pull of the South fuel his powerful work. The Louisiana-born writer looks back on his career, focusing on the ways the South repeatedly influences his poetry. “I’m interested in—what is that word? Posterity,” Brown says. “I’m almost ashamed to say it, but when I die, I want to die in the South and I want people to think of me, if anybody ever thinks of me, to think of me in contrast to and in context of this place. That’s important to me.”
Jericho Brown and the South
Don’t Mess with Shakespeare
“Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately.” The New Yorker on why we don’t change Shakespeare’s language. You could also check out our traditional and modern readings of Shakespeare.
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“The town was called Dayton.”
Recommended Reading: Rachael Maddux’s “Hail Dayton,” which features one of the finest opening paragraphs ever printed.
Alexander Chee: “I, Reader”
Alexander Chee has a lovely essay about books and technology up at The Morning News.
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The First Family of Letters
Want to become a successful writer? Get adopted by Stephen King. With five fiction writers to their name — Stephen, Tabitha King, Joe Hill, Owen King, and his wife, Kelly Braffet — the Kings have turned writing into a family business, according to The New York Times Magazine profile on the clan. Pair with: the accompanying article on “Easter eggs” found in the family’s fiction.
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Overlooked Books of the Decade
The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Aira, Wallace, Costello
New Directions releases César Aira’s The Hare this week. The novel was featured on our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview not long ago. Today also marks the release date for David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello’s Signifying Rappers, which is being re-released by Little, Brown.
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