The New York Times Book Review just published its notable 100 for 2010. Topping the list is the misleading “Fiction and Poetry” header, misleading as it is mostly fiction and three books of poems. Yes, 3. There are three fiction titles starting with the letter A on the list. Oh, the hypocrisy.
It’s always a pleasure when a Quarterly Conversation contributor publishes a book; many of our reviewers are published writers of fiction, poetry, and criticism, and each time one of them publishes a new book, it feels like the Quarterly Conversation gets woven just a bit more tightly into the complicated, ever-fascinating fabric of contemporary literature.
Today’s [...]
One of the minor beats I seem to have inadvertently taken up for this blog is that of pointing out places in novels where the status or suffering poets is lamented–which, it turns out are not that uncommon.
Today’s comes from Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir! (2004), a present-day reworking of the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves relationship. The [...]
Over at the Poetry Foundation’s site, Alizah Salario has a long, informative, and well-reported article about the difficulties that face publishers when they try to turn books of poetry into e-books.
The problems lie, primarily, with the difficulty of getting an e-pub format–and thus an e-reader–to render the careful lineation of poetry correctly. Like prose, [...]
If you want to really scare the trick-or-treaters today, tell them that if they want any candy, they first have to be quiet and patient while you read them a poem.
Over at the Poetry Foundation’s site, Becca Klaver has rounded up a bunch of poems suitable for scaring. Add in this video of John Astin [...]
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