The Poets & Writers 2012 MFA Rankings have–repeatedly, it seems–managed to cause quite a ruckus. Now: one Columbia grad is upset that his alma mater’s place on the list has fallen.
David Orr on the legal perils of quoting books in reviews.
It might not be the best idea to write poetry about a murder you’re charged with committing.
We’ve all had the experience of reading a paragraph so knotty and mind-bending it won’t let us forget it. Consider, for example, the opening of Peter Handke’s novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, written in 1970.
Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are: “You mustn’t scare parents. And I think with my books, I managed to scare parents. “Before that, the attitude towards children was: Keep them calm, keep them happy, keep them snug and safe. It’s not a putdown of those earlier books. But basically, they went by the rules that children should be safe and that we adults should be their guardians. I got out of that, and I was considered outlandish. So be it.”
(Translation: “Maybe you never had an imaginary friend.” Via Na??ma/yukinon.)
Dubravka Ugresic: “The more irremediable the death of the book becomes, the more wild and flailing the resuscitation effort. The publishing industry is producing a greater number of books, and is doing so faster than ever before. The good old days when literary bestsellers appeared every few years, or maybe once a year, are irrevocably past. Today global bestsellers burn brightly on a monthly basis, and then fizzle as fast as New Year’s firecrackers. Overnight fame and hefty advances reserved for the few lucky puppies are no longer a secret, and neither are the annual earnings of the industry’s top producers.”
Did Nabokov prefigure a good portion of modern psychology?
R. I. P. Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg.