Happy Halloween! In honor of the spooky holiday, Vol.1 has collected some particularly frightening Bites, ranging from the traditionally fun-filled, the absolutely outraging, and the sadly serious. Lit. Did medical malpractice lead to the death of John Keats, leaving the poet starving and anguished? Wait, isn’t that what poets are definitively? After losing his own book deal, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford praises Ayn Rand. In a review of Alistair Morgan’s Sleeper’s Wake, The Rumpus expostulates on the penis as […]
Bites: Edward Lear poetry, rare Obama interview, Tim Burton cares not, San Fran’s strategic real estate changes, fighting for the “link economy”
By Willa A. Cmiel The Book Bench on Edward Lear: “This week the British Library is publishing two beautiful facsimiles (which will be distributed by the University of Chicago Press), of the 1888 and 1889 editions of books by the multi-talented Edward Lear, an English artist and writer best known for the children’s classic ‘The Owl and the Pussycat.‘” More personally he reminds me of family car trips reciting limericks. My personal favorite: There once was a Young Person of […]
Tao Lin’s Muumuu House: Romantic Realism in Two Books of Poetry
Literary realism, like most literary classifications, is vague and ambiguous and difficult to define. In some capacity, it can be characterized as a reaction against, or an answer to, literary romanticism. The current state of affairs is such that panic ensues with every newspaper that closes its doors and Armageddon is exclaimed when new ideas like Twitter proliferate. Killings are over- or under-aggrandized, depending. Wars are either heroic or dastardly; even having no stance is a taking a stance. The […]
Monday Bites: literary duels, giant guinea pigs, poets being selfish, pynchon reviews, daria, david cronenberg picks delillo’s worst book
Good morning! Did you know that Dostoevsky once challenged Turgenev to a duel? I ask, with swords?? Do famous writers still duel? Norman Mailer probably did. And Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez sort of managed, although it was more of a one-punch deal. On literary feuds. Giant guinea pigs trump boy wizards, apparently. The Daily Beast interviews Jeffrey Eugenides, who was fired from his desk job at the Academy of American Poets for writing parts of The Virgin […]
Bites: Bukowski, the death of print, Julia Wertz, WFMU
The Rumpus has published a previously unpublished forward by Charles Bukowski. Speaking of poetry, if you’ve published some, you can apply to live in Robert Frost’s farmhouse for two months next summer, and hope for osmosis. Is everyone reading Little Dorrit right now? Ann Kirschner of The Chronicle Review uses multiple text formats (four of them, actually). WP Book World’s Short Stack notes the connection between Dickens scoundrel Mr. Merdle to our 21st-century’s Mr. Madoff. Is print news really dying, […]