October is National Arts and Humanities month, and at USA Today, poet Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how art is essential to addressing the most pressing issues of our time. “Salvation is not a word to be used lightly given the crises we face,” Alexander writes. “But even as we come together to address them—through civic engagement, through work toward racial justice, through the development of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs—I believe that it is the arts and humanities that can save us: the essential us, the who-we-are-as-human-beings us.”
Elizabeth Alexander Turns to the Arts to Save Us
You Would Prefer Not To… Miss This.
Thursday 11/10, come on down to 60 Wall Street for a marathon reading of Herman Melville‘s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story was in part tied to the Occupy Wall Street movement by Hannah Gerson in a great piece for us last month.
Reimagining Biography
“I’m drawn to books that deal in fragments and digressions, authors that patch together something larger from these pieces while also letting them stand on their own.” Sam Stephenson writes about “reimagining what a biography can look like” and reading Tennessee Williams: Notebooks, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton, in a piece for The Paris Review. He also mentions Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which Tyler Gillespie recently reviewed for The Millions.
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Top 20 Short Stories of 2010
Chris Flynn of Australian Book Review runs down the top 20 short stories of 2010 (many of them American) at his blog, Fly the Falcon.
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Feeding Minds and Mouths
“For kids to be well-read, they need to be well-fed.” The New York Times reports on the trend of U.S. libraries providing summer meals to children.
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Let’s Write About Sex Baby
“Her pincers tore at me… I stormed her openings as if she was a beleaguered fortress.” We’re wincing-slash-laughing at Lapham’s Quarterly‘s infographic of authors’ attempts to put sex down on the page throughout history. Pair with author Julia Fierro‘s great piece about trying to *do it* in her first novel.
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