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Roger Angell Nation
When you read Roger Angell, you can (it’s cheesy, but true!) smell clover and hear the crack of a baseball against a baseball bat. Angell is synonymous with baseball writing, and this week, he’s being inducted into the Hall of Fame. To celebrate, the New Yorker has a post up, featuring a video interview with Angell and…
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Turned Out I Wanted A Snack
In the newest installment of the Believer‘s interview series, What Would Twitter Do?, Sheila Heti interviews the reigning queen of Twitter, Patricia Lockwood. Patricia breaks down Pie Dough Disease: when pie dough (aka, a tweet) has “been to too much college” and refuses to be shaped. And also, loneliness: I don’t experience much loneliness, oddly. Sometimes I…
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Zadie Smith: Pathological Reader
In Oprah, the author writes that her consumption of books may be absurd, but that, at least, summer is a good time to have pathological reading habits. I would like to say in my defense that I don’t really get the appeal of YOLO. I live many times over. Hypothetical, subterranean lives that run beneath the relative…
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140 Keystrokes
It’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent essay on anxiety about poetry, in an Internet age. Is poetry dead, does it matter, is there too much of it, does anyone anywhere buy…
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90% More Prose
Calling all T.S Eliot nerds (or, just nerds): nearly 90% of Eliot’s prose has been unavailable or out-out-print; this year, Ronald Schuchard is publishing the first out of his eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S Eliot.
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The Poetry of Power Tools
Dan Piepenbring writes at the Paris Review about the universe inside industrial-supply catalogs, which offer a different kind of poetry to readers: And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a kind of materialist awe. It makes for a reading experience more engaging, imaginative, and informative than almost anything that passes as literature. I’ve put down…
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The Cover Design Exams
A heart, the source of empathy, or at least what we use as a visual for love, was an initial starting point. As a nod to the medical part of the essay, a graphic illustration of a heart is used. Kimberly Glyder was responsible for designing the cover of Leslie Jamison‘s essay collection, The Empathy Exams.…
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A Yelp, of Sorts
The Morning Review is doing a series of restaurant reviews by writers which isn’t exactly a series of restaurant reviews. This is exactly the criteria: “1) it is a restaurant review; 2) it is not a restaurant review.” The first essay in the series is by our own Roxanne Gay, and is about a restaurant named Radio Maria,…
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Dear Alice
Alice Munro’s birthday was last week (happy belated, Alice!). She’s also Elliott Holt‘s favorite writer, and over at Literary Mothers, Elliott wrote a beautiful letter to her: Your stories provide deeply private pleasures. You are our writer, part of our family. Now that you’ve won the Nobel, even more people have joined our ranks. And I’m…
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Learning Curves
Have you ever regretted the way in which you once wrote? In this week’s New York Times “Bookends” column, Anna Holmes and Leslie Jamison take this question on. A few early mistakes, as listed by Holmes: Inserting myself into reported narratives where I didn’t belong. Crafting long, complex sentences that I thought made me sound intelligent…
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Summer Reading List
If you’re looking for independent bookstores to visit on your Southern road trip—or, in the absence of a road trip, want to know what Southern booksellers are reading this summer—then check out this interview with five Southern indie bookshop owners. Read up!
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Text-ing
Interactive digital storytelling: fiction’s next frontier? In the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop examines interactive technologies as used in Blood & Laurels, by Emily Short: Exploring those possibilities is one reason Ms. Short became a writer of interactive fiction rather than of more conventional stories. “I found myself frustrated that I couldn’t write multiple versions of the same scene,” she…