June 7, 2013 On the Shelf A Library Grows in Istanbul, and Other News By Sadie Stein The British comic novelist Tom Sharpe has died at 85. Protesters have erected a makeshift library in Istanbul. “The books, arranged on shelves laid on breeze blocks below a tarpaulin, range from left-wing philosophy to author Dan Brown. With contributions from individuals and bookstores, the number of books has swelled to more than 5,000.” Author John Green makes a passionate appeal to “strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation … because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.” Narrowing this list down to only ten misbehaving literary rogues must have been a challenge. (And we are offended on Bukowski’s behalf.) And without further ado: a dog who allegedly has a “grasp of the basic elements of grammar.”
June 6, 2013 Look You’re Saying It Wrong By Sadie Stein This series of infographics, illustrating how different parts of the country say different things, is fascinating. Below: mayonnaise.
June 6, 2013 On Poetry Henry Doesn’t Have Any Bats By Catherine Lacey My poetry shelf is slim but holds the most thumbed book I own: John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and, until recently, I would read several songs a week, rereading my favorites as if they held some kind of clue. I read them to cheer myself or wallow. I read them aloud, alone and to other people. Some nights after having wine, I’d read the meanest, strangest ones aloud. When I found a copy in a bookstore, I’d open to a favorite and hand it to someone. Even his darkest, most dire, most hopeless songs soothe me. Lines worm in me for weeks. It’s not that I think Berryman is the most talented writer or that he has written the most important poems or that his work has reached some aesthetic pinnacle or that I have nothing better to read. All of those things are untrue, and yet I am compelled to read his work in a way I am not often compelled by anyone else’s work. I am still trying to understand why. Nearly a decade ago, I almost made myself sick on them during a New Orleans summer. While hurricanes spun toward us from the gulf, dire conversations at the grocery store blended into my Dream Song summer like milk poured into milk. A note signed J.B. at the front of the book: The poem then … is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age … who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second. Read More
June 6, 2013 Quote Unquote Enttäuschung By Sadie Stein “In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.” ―Thomas Mann
June 6, 2013 Fiction 1 Story of God: 71 By Joy Williams Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we will be running a series of pieces from Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. First published in The Paris Review in 1968, Joy Williams has since appeared in our pages many times. 99 Stories of God is her first book of fiction in nearly a decade and was written, she has said, partly in an attempt to imitate the inimitable Thomas Bernhard, that “cranky genius of Austrian literature,” and his The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories. 71 A child was walking with a lion through a great fog. “I’ve experienced death many times,” the lion said. “Impossible,” the child said. “It’s true, my experience of death does not include my own.” “I’m glad.” “I’ve had near-death experiences, however.” “Quite a different matter,” the child said. Read More
June 6, 2013 On the Shelf Joyce Carol Oates Gives Questionable Advice, and Other News By Sadie Stein “If you want to get the news from poems, you’ve come to the right place.” That would be the Boston Review. So much for reading being its own reward. This principal eats worms when his students meet reading goals. Mandarin: a language uniquely well-suited to punning. First-edition book clubs are, apparently, a thing. In the words of one friend, “We live in a sad and awesome time.” “As an author with a half century of literary success behind me, I can assure you the only way to make it in this industry is to meet as many publishers as you possibly can and then fuck them.” Joyce Carol Oates, meet The Onion.