Dean Rader: “Levine is a great choice for Poet Laureate, especially now. No living American poet has written more probingly or more beautifully about work than Levine. But, by no mean is that a profound observation. His phenomenal poem ‘What Work Is’ was mentioned in almost every story last week. What is less obvious, though, is how important it is to have a poet who is committed to writing about America’s working class.”
On the Ploughshares blog, Catherine Carter reflects on the perks and plights of being a manuscript reader.
Next month, Random House will re-publish seven lost stories by Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, under the title The Bippolo Seed.
A significant number of canonical authors began their careers as copywriters for advertising agencies.
What would you do with a $60,000 poetry grant? Brock University professor Adam Dickinson’s using the sum to write a book incorporating information about pollutants found in his body after he’s been tested for them.
A Berlin library is returning 70 books stolen by Nazis to the Social Democratic Party, including an 1883 copy of the Communist Manifesto believed to have belonged to Friedrich Engels himself.
Amy Waldman on her new novel, The Submission–more specifically, on deciding not to talk to the families of 9/11 victims when writing the book: “Being a former reporter, if I interview someone or sit with them, it’s very hard to then take what I wanted from their experience and then feel free to invent whatever I didn’t. I’m so trained to be faithful on the page to what somebody tells me. I didn’t want that burden and I didn’t want voices in my head, would this person like the book or not? I think that would have made it more challenging.”
Ever wonder what Obama’s reading this summer?