At the Paris Review, Adrienne Raphel looks back at Beverly Cleary’s beloved Ramona Quimby series, and notes that the books are riddled with odd discrepancies that are both puzzling and charming. “Ramona taught us how to look for the weirdness in the everyday,” Raphel writes, “and the everyday in the scariest moments. When she wears a particularly gruesome witch costume in Ramona the Pest (the baddest witch in the world!,’ she declares), she begins the day delighted with her anonymity, but ends terrified by the greatest fear of all: no one will know who she is. So, she carries a huge poster with her name on it, presumably beaming under the warty disguise. The mask itself isn’t scary—disappearing, anonymity, being forgotten is what’s most frightening of all.”
Embracing the Mysteries in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby Books
$pending the $tephen King Money
What do you do when Stephen King uses the same title on one of his books as you used on yours (which came out earlier)? You reap the rewards of mistaken Amazon purchases, and you document the spoils of those royalty checks.
Landlines, as Seen in Nabokov, Kafka, and More
Populist Poetics
“What happens when everyone’s a poet?” asked Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review. Now, Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula debate what that popularity might actually mean for contemporary poetry.
Swedish Covers
50 watts, a blog dedicated to book-related design and illustration, takes a look at Swedish book covers.
Emily Wells
If you like the music of groups like Portishead, CocoRosie, and the Cocteau Twins, you might be interested in the eerie musical dreamscapes of Emily Wells, a gifted violinist and vocalist whose work combines classical, folk, and hip hop. Here she performs “Symphony 1 In the Barrel of a Gun.”