-- "Writing like a white guy." Jaswinder Bolina says his father advises him to use a pseudonym. "He means: Let them think you’re a white guy. This will make it easier for you."
-- A musical adaptation of Tuck Everlasting is hoping to make it to Broadway next season.
-- A new column in Scientific American is called "Literally Psyched" and will "use literature and creative inspiration to explore concepts in the psychology of the mind and human thought." First up is an examination of Freud's legacy through the eyes of W.H. Auden.
-- I wanna shmee-book. From The New York Times: "E-books, shmee-books: readers return to the stores."
-- Should Amazon pay real-life booksellers an affiliate fee? A modest proposal.
-- Of a piece this bookish season: Richard Russo on "Amazon's Jungle Logic"; Chad W. Post on bookstores and controversies; and The New York Times on "For Amazon, Lashes and Backlashes."
-- Telling Slate's Farhad Manjoo what's what.
-- You've been following a Year in Reading, yes? It's getting more and more interesting. Recent contributions come from Mona Simpson, Siddhartha Deb, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alex Ross, and Mayim Bialik (really).
-- "Inscribe the poem on yourself." The joys of memorization.
-- Settle in and let Ben Ehrenreich tell you about the extraordinary Julio Cortázar.
-- I used to get to pal around with Ingrid Norton the year she lived in Detroit. She's off in New Orleans, but I'm happy I get to meet again with this brilliant young writer through her essays. In The Los Angeles Review of Books, she takes on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, a history of violence, with nuance and grace.
-- The New Yorker looks at the ten most significant positive stories to come out of Africa this year, including Maker Faire Africa, economic growth, South Sudan's independence, and the utterly amazing Walk to Work protests in Uganda. Curiously, the successful Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia in particular did not make the list. Maybe these stories weren't considered positive enough, given that a lot of suffering happened along the way (but that doesn't make sense because the Walk to Work reprisals were brutal...). I liked the list overall, but what's missing communicates the discomfiting idea that Arab Africa is not "real" Africa.
-- The team from New Directions talks it up about "new experiments in literature from around the world."
-- The always-on-point Roxane Gay exhales when she see what's on the big best-books-of-the-year list and asks us to push "toward a more complete measure of excellence."
-- Related: Roxane Gay is interviewed at the Kenyon Review blog and asked about both Midwest writing and erotica. (As if there's any difference .... BOOM!)
-- South Writ Large is a new quarterly magazine that "explores the relationship of the American South to the wider world." It seems to not catch the implication of the phrase "a Global South" in its mission statement, but overall looks like an interesting project. (Thanks to Katie B. for the link.)
-- Gabriel Sherman tells us "how sports journalism got serious."
-- The full episodes of the wonderful PBS miniseries on "Women, War, and Peace" are available online, along with a wealth of complimentary interviews, resources, updates, essays, and other multimedia material.
-- "Magazines Gird for USPS Nixing Saturday Delivery."
-- Peter Osnos adores the New York Review of Books. (I agree.)
-- This week's Read This Next is Three Messages and a Warning which is an anthology of "thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity." How is that for a hook?
-- Thank you to Feministing, The Rumpus, and Largehearted Boy for their respective shouts for Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories! Sayeth The Rumpus: "At 69 downloadable pages, the guide itself would make a great gift." Feministing: "If you are looking for a super comprehensive, thoughtful and well researched guide for picking books for the loved ones in your life, check it out."
-- The White Review has an expansive interview with David Graeber, whose book I've been salivating over since summer.
-- Eleven great longreads from Joan Didion's magazine writing are collected over at Byliner.
-- As part of the Columbia Journalism Review's ongoing fiftieth anniversary celebration, it collects the words from seven top reporters and one great photographer on the how and why of what they do. See in particular what the indefatigable Dana Priest of The Washington Post has to say.
-- Over at Harper's: Six questions for Jeff Sharlet.
-- South Africa is afire over the new "secrets" bill.
-- A striking and uncomfortable letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel, written by one Zora Neale Hurston in 1955: "I regard the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race." She's talking about Brown v. Board of Education. (Via Dana Goldstein.)
-- Just discovered: "Dickens in Eden." Or, Great Expectations for summer vacation.
-- "Miss Piggy, Literary Icon."
-- From the inimitable comic artist Kate Beaton: "Wuthering Heights: Part Three: Heathcliff and Cathy Grow Up."
About the Image: The Poetry Foundation
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