Visit a Museum
Visit a museum or an art gallery. While looking at the art, transcribe fragments from the written descriptions and/or titles that accompany each work. Create a poem out of the fragments you've transcribed.
B*tches in Bookshops
Check out the dope rhymes in La Shea Delaney and Annabelle Quezada's literary version of a song by Jay Z and Kayne West. "War and Peace, piece of cake, read Tolstoy in three days. / Straight through, no delays. / Didn't miss a word. Not one phrase." The song was recorded and mixed by Stephen Galgano.
Mike Daisey Controversy, Jeanette Winterson on Gender Bias, and More
This American Life retracted its popular episode featuring an excerpt from Mike Daisey's one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs; new brain imaging studies indicate the human mind reacts to fictional characters similar to real-life encounters; Laura Miller reveals how the Hunger Games franchise was launched; and other news.
Yes Yes
Lukas Fiala and Nicole Schmitt recently partnered to create this animated look at Charles Bukowski's rather ecstatic poem, which appears in Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Ecco, 2002).
Kurt Vonnegut's Story Grids, Labor Dispute at the Strand, and More
GalleyCat features a helpful writing tool Kurt Vonnegut used; the famed Strand bookstore in New York City is in the midst of a labor dispute with its employees; an Italian human rights group insists Dante's Divine Comedy is offensive and should be removed from schools; and other news.
A. J. Jacobs
At one of last year's TED conferences, writer A. J. Jacobs spoke about his long, three-tiered self-improvement project that has resulted in three books, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), The Year of Biblical Thinking: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), and Drop-Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).
Five Young Literary Lions Contend for 2012 Prize
The New York Public Library has announced the five finalists for its twelfth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, given to an emerging writer for a work published in in the previous year. The winner of the honor, which carries a prize of ten thousand dollars, will be announced on May 14.
The 2012 finalists are Teju Cole for Open City (Random House), Benjamin Hale for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve), Ben Lerner for Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press), Karen Russell for Swamplandia! (Knopf), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury). Salvage the Bones, Ward's second novel after her breakout, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Publishing, 2008), won the National Book Award in fiction last fall. Cole's debut was a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle Award.
Recent winners of the NYPL's top honor for emerging writers are Adam Levin for The Instructions (McSweeney's Books, 2010), Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and Salvatore Scibona for The End (Graywolf Press, 2008). The award is an program of the library's Young Lions, a group of donors in their twenties and thirties.
In the video below, finalist Teju Cole presents "a sneak peak" into his nascent nonfiction project at Franklin Park bar in Brooklyn, New York.
Novelist Sues Fox, John Barr Retires, and More
Matthew Yglesias discusses the Justice Department's planned antitrust lawsuit concerning the price of e-books; Barry Eisler comes to Amazon's defense; A writer, Everette Hallford, is suing Fox, claiming the new television series Touch is based on his novel Visionary; and other news.
This Morning
"All the things / I hoped would go away this morning. / The stuff I live with every day. What / I've trampled on in order to stay alive." Raymond Carver's poem is read by Alessio Morglia and illustrated and animated by Alessandro Ferraro in this short video.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Says Goodbye to Print, Reasons to Stop Writing, and More
After over two centuries, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will no longer be printed; the Wall Street Journal reports that e-readers are fueling a boom in sales of erotic novels; critic Dwight Garner looks at the life and poetry of Jack Gilbert; and other news.
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