First, in the Saturday Essay, Melissa Carroll praises the “refreshing” film, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. But despite the wonderful story, great acting, and a great soundtrack, something about the movie falls short, Carroll argues. Some aspects of the adaptation are not fully faithful to Phoebe Gloeckner‘s graphic novel of the same name. “Unfortunately,” Carroll writes, “Marielle Heller’s conclusions about happiness are in direct conflict with Gloeckner’s.”
Next, “by spending time inside of [James Tate’s] odd worlds,” Mikko Harvey writes in a review of Tate’s last collection, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, “we can then look up and see the oddness of our own.” The “small-town strangeness” of these poems invites the reader in.
And in the Sunday Essay, Dika Lam dives into the recent controversy stemming from Best American Poetry‘s acceptance of a white author named Michael Derrick Hudson who used an Asian pseudonym on his submission. Writerly merit is, unfortunately, balanced against editorial prejudice and the overcompensation for prejudice in the publishing industry of today.
