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Link reblogged from Discombobulated with 12 notes
Discombobulated: "Publication Date" by Franz Wright →
One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private
National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning
and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?
A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead —
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.
Source: sniffyjenkins
We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?
And the sky going everywhere?While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.
Photo reblogged from Women Reading with 2,831 notes
A lovely Book Week poster from 1924, designed by Jessie Willcox Smith, who illustrated many children’s books.
Source: abebooks.com
Photoset reblogged from The Penguin Press with 78 notes
Happy 75th birthday to Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press team heartily supports the Pynchon in Public initiative, which asks nothing more than for us to read V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, Slow Learner, Vineland, or The Crying of Lot 49 in public.
From today’s Writer’s Almanac on Pynchon:
“There are few photos of him in circulation, and much about him comes by way of rumor or anecdote. According to an account written by his college friend, Pynchon was obsessive about his teeth, and he studied with Nabokov at Cornell but couldn’t understand what he was saying. It’s been rumored at various times that Pynchon is living in Mexico, has died, or is really J.D. Salinger.”
Source: thepenguinpress
Link reblogged from ami with an i with 16 notes
7x20x21 at BEA 2012 →
Once again, I will be hosting 7x20x21 at Book Expo America with my good friend (and closet breakdancer extraordinaire) Ryan Chapman.
If you’ve never attended 7x20x21 before, it’s an Ignite-style talk where speakers have 7 minutes and 20 powerpoint slides to tell you all about their current publishing obsessions.
Sadly, this event is open only to folks attending this year’s BEA in New York, but there will be video taken and I will post it here!
- Statistician Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog at the NYT and should be the first thing you read every morning this fall
- Shelia Heti, author of Ticknor and the upcoming How Should a Person Be? (download the first two chapters)
- Robin Sloan, former Twitter employee, writer, media inventor, and creator of the much-lauded tap essay Fish.
- D. T. Max, writer of the upcoming David Foster Wallace bio, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. (Read his New Yorker article about DFW.)
- Dan Wilbur, creator of Better Book Titles, a blog which offers this replacement title for Much Abo about Nothing: ‘An Extremely Complex Lie Will Clearly Solve Everything.’
- Jason Booher, book jacket designer and creator of the cover for Nick Harkway’s Angelmaker, which features an incredibly-hard-to-crack codethe solution to which will be revealed to the audience!
All followed by a drinks reception where you can hang out with the speakers and make time with other attractive BEA attendees.
Tuesday, June 5th
Downtown Stage at BEA
3-4 PM, followed by cocktails from 4-5.
BE THERE.
Source: amiwithani
Link reblogged from Bookavore with 24 notes
A story about the book industry I would actually like to read →
I am sure in every industry it is the same: nobody likes to read what non-industry reporters have to say about what they do for a living. It is almost always painful. This seems to be a special problem for the book industry. By their nature, journalists are likely to want to think about how the printed word is doing, and by its nature, the book industry is likely to read articles about itself, and then write about them. There are about ten stories written about the book industry outside of the industry (and, let’s be honest, this is a problem inside the industry as well); my personal bugbears are ebooks and physical books are locked in a cage match TO THE DEATH, comics aren’t just for kids anymore! and several people who don’t agree told us different things about book pricing.
With this in mind, I respectfully and selfishly offer an article idea.
Seconded.
Source: bookavore
Photo reblogged from Awesome People Reading with 42 notes
Mayor Bloomberg reads and suddenly realizes what he’s reading is, despite the cover displaying a necktie, not a business book.
Ridiculous bow tie Bloomberg gets all the reblogs.
Source: awesomepeoplereading
Photo with 2 notes
When I arrive, Richard Blanco speaks of Cuba
as I had wished, and the city quiets all around him.
“If our bodies house our souls,” I think to myself,
“Then, Richard, poets are the interior decorators of the mind.”
-from The Prodigal Son, by Spencer Reece, in this month’s Poetry Magazine.
Photoset reblogged from Bookavore with 19 notes
Sometimes you ask the internet to make you a thing, and it actually happens. And then Stephanie dies of laughter (not pictured). With thanks to Vlad and Toby, who are our favorites.
I can’t decide which one I like better BUT I DON’T HAVE TO
WODEHOUSE! WODEHOUSE! WODEHOUSE!
Source: wordbrooklyn
Photoset reblogged from with 25 notes
The Housing Works Bookstore Cafe hosted the Knopf/Tumblr Poetry Reading last night (4.23.12), featuring the 2011–2012 Poet Laureate, Philip Levine, 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner, Tracy K. Smith, and two poets from the Tumblr community, Saeed Jones and Karolina Manko.
Below Levine recites a selection of his poems …
Source: forgettable-e
Link reblogged from this isn't happiness. with 1,850 notes
The 13 Most Useless Majors →
- Fine Arts
- Drama and Theater Arts
- Film, Video, and Photographic Arts
- Commercial Art and Graphic Design
- Architecture
- Philosophy and Religious Studies
- English Literature and Language
- Journalism
- Anthropology and Archeology
- Hospitality Management
- Music
- History
- Political Science and Government
7 and 12 baby!
Source: nevver
Post with 2 notes
On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane
By Philip Levine
Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment’s relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early night comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
Let’s not be frivolous, let’s
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let’s not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won’t forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river. Have you ever
had a vision? Have you ever shaken
your head to pieces and jerked back
at the image of your young son
falling through open space, not
from the stern of a ship bound
from Vera Cruz to New York but from
the roof of the building he works on?
Have you risen from bed to pace
until dawn to beg a merciless God
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,
let’s bless the imagination. It gives
us the myths we live by. Let’s bless
the visionary power of the human—
the only animal that’s got it—,
bless the exact image of your father
dead and mine dead, bless the images
that stalk the corners of our sights
and will not let go. The young man
was my cousin, Arthur Lierberman,
then a language student at Columbia,
who told me all this before he died
quietly in his sleep in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!
(via The Poetry Foundation)
It’s World Book Night and our Poet Laureate is on his way to Housing Works, tonight at 7 PM. I’ll be there. Tell me you can’t wait.
Photo with 9 notes
One need not comment on the substance of this NYMag article on publishing to appreciate the beauty of its accompanying illustration.
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