At Philly Mag, Sonia Sanchez shares her picks for the “essential books” of Black Literature. “Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois. And Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston,” Sanchez says. “You cannot teach Black literature without them. And of course, then you have Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka. All of the women who came out of the Black Arts Movement, talking about what it was to be a Black female in a place called America.”
Sonia Sanchez’s Essential Black Literature
Gabriel García Márquez Can No Longer Write
Gabriel García Márquez can no longer write due to senile dementia, though “he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had,” announced Márquez’s brother.
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James Franco is Allen Ginsberg
Book to movie news: Soon to hit theaters is a big-screen take on Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, focusing on the obscenity trial Ginsberg faced after the publication of the poem and starring James Franco as Ginsberg (alongside Jon Hamm and Jeff Daniels). (The trailer). The film includes an animation of the poem itself by illustrator Eric Drooker. Art from the animation has been collected in a new book under the title Howl: A Graphic Novel.
Quarantined with Mrs. Dalloway
If you find yourself rereading Mrs. Dalloway while in lockdown, you're not alone. Evan Kindley examines why the novel is a balm for anxious readers.
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He Also Plays Football Tonight at 8pm
They’ve called him a sports icon, a “national nightmare,” an author, and a punchline. They’ve questioned the backlash against him, and tracked his particular brand of “muscular Christianity.” Coincidental religious symbolism has been noted. Yet so far nothing has come close to genius of Jimmy Fallon’s rendition of Tim Tebow as… TeBowie.
A Library Without Walls
Robert Darnton at the New York Review of Books considers the feasibility of creating a National Digital Library: “I know: the devil can cite Jefferson. Anyone can cull through the papers of the Founding Fathers in order to find quotations in support of a cause. But I can’t resist.”
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Trolling with Amanda Palmer
Art is about connecting the dots, Amanda Palmer proposed in her keynote address on creativity and sharing art in the internet age at the 2013 Grub Muse Literary Conference earlier this month. “For every bridge you build together with your community of readers, there’s a new set of trolls who sit underneath it,” she said about the internet.
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