TOBI'S DESK

Last-minute signal boost! You have a few more hours to donate to I, Too, Arts Collective ‘s campaign to convert  Langston Hughes ‘s former home  into a non-profit cultural center. See also: our own Tess Malone ’s review of his  Tambourines to Glory . The post Saving Hughes’s House appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bCesOr

Madeline DeFrees’s poem “The Book of Sediments” appeared in our Fall 1983 issue . Her last collection, Spectral Waves , was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2006; DeFrees passed away last year.  Beside my bed the lamplight glows: a glass base filled with shells containing news of ocean. Each shell encloses what the sea says to the listener. Each whorl and coil reflects the secrets there.                                                 Echo and Narcissus. He falls in love with the image: his vision flowers. She pines away for the other: nothing left but the voice. The sun-drowned sepals in the old stereoscope we called a stereopticon: two complementary views—right eye and left—caught on film the brain registers and light fuses to a third dimension. We let those wave-lengths tell us what the world means, a corollary of echo- location: differ...

Having faked his death in 1891 to escape mounting debts and increasingly credible threats of violence from rival traders in the Gulf of Aden, Rimbaud lay low for more than four decades. While his former friends and colleagues were elevating his poetic works and mysterious youth into a cult, he kept his distance. He stayed busy, variously occupied as a beachcomber on the Côte d’Azur, a croupier at Monte Carlo, a phony “fakir” in a traveling carnival, a roving photographer with donkey on the Belgian coast, a promoter of spurious miracle sites in the Borinage, and finally twenty years as “Beauraind,” an intermittently successful music-hall ventriloquist. He lavishes many pages on his dummy, Hugo, with whom he seems to have enjoyed the most intimate and rewarding relationship of his life. Together they traveled incessantly, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Rhineland to the Bay of Biscay, lodging in rooming houses and train-station hotels, sharing—he would have us belie...

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these diaries. I have to be honest: I don’t think it’s ever been more difficult for me to find time to read. It’s strange, because I’m reading more than I have in years, and yet I struggle for those hours of solitude. I schedule them, I turn on Freedom, I turn off my phone, I go to bars alone, I give up on critically acclaimed TV shows, I unsubscribe from podcasts, and every afternoon I sit my son down in front of Octonauts so that I can sneak into his room and read novels and magazines. I like to read in my son’s room because he has a single bed like the one I had in college, and it is covered by a quilt that my mother made for me. Sitting on that little bed, surrounded by toys, I feel as if I have permission to read solely for the fun of it — not because I need to, for an assignment, or because it will be beneficial, in some indirect way, for my writing. When I started reading In Search of Lost Time at the beginning of the year, I plann...

The countdown is on: at midnight tonight , we’re closing the gate on our  joint subscription deal with the  London Review of Books . For the third consecutive summer, we’ve offered a year’s subscription to both magazines for $70 U.S . That’s the best in imaginative writing and the best in essays and commentary: two  Review s in one fell swoop. ( Already a  Paris Review  subscriber?  Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to  The Paris Review  for another year, and your  LRB  subscription will begin immediately.) So sign up today —there isn’t any time to lose. The post Last Chance for Our Summer Deal appeared first on The Paris Review . from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2bC6U8r

William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer . Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents , was published in June. I called Tagliamonte because I’d noticed more and more people using the word truly . All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work e-mails and movie reviews, in headlines, on Twitter, on Twitter, and on Twitter. “It truly is up to us,” Hilary Clinton said this summer in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. A week prior, in Cleveland, Trump had remembered his “truly great mother.” Is truly trending? I couldn’t tell—Liane Moriarty’s book, Truly Madly Guilty , had just published. There had been that Savage Garden song in the nineties , and the Lionel Richie one in the eighties . I wanted to find out more, so I did what anyone with a linguistics question would do: I e-mailed Noam Chomsky. To my surprise, he wrote back within half ...

Nicole Eisenman, The Session . Image via The Easel . Hatred, they say, loves company—especially the company of artists and writers. Well, it’s getting worse: before we know it, hatred may become the dominant critical school of the century! Consumed with hatred, by that time, you will fail to remember that it all began with The Hatred of Poetry , Ben Lerner’s book-length essay. More recently, though, Lerner’s hatred has infected Hal Foster, respected critic and historian of visual art. The two spoke at Frieze New York, and the conversation how now been transcribed. Here is Foster reminiscing about his early years, when he hated painting and tried to kill it: “ Well, I was part of a critical clique that, at an early point in the debate over postmodernism, wanted to put painting to death. There is a revolutionary rush to the declaration of any end. The history of modernism is punctuated by the thrill of the fini !” The debate over nationalist and cosmopolitan literature ...

Kojo Laing's works have been on my to-read list for the longest time, and recently while in Kampala (thank you Bookpoint stall at Writivism), I finally got my hands on two of them: his first novel Search Sweet Country , and the second one  Woman of the Aeroplanes .  Already excited about the prospect of finally owning and getting to read Laing's novels, this morning I came across the latest issue of Chimurenga's  Chronic  - which explores ideas around mythscience, science fiction and graphic storytelling .  If the new issue wasn't exciting enough it, Nikhil Singh (if you haven't seen his stunning illustrations, check some of them out here ) has a graphic story that imagines the Achimota Wars from Laing's 1992 novel,  Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars . Set in 2020, the novel pits Major Gentl against the mercenary Torro the Terrible for control of Achiomota City. The two warriors prepare for a final battle which will decide the fate of Africa's future. ...

Seventy years ago, The New Yorker devoted its entire contents to a single article for the first and only time in its history. With no prior announcement or warning, the August 31st, 1946 issue eschewed the magazine’s trademark cartoons and “Talk of the Town” section in favor of something less frivolous: a 30,000-word article on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima . The article appeared just over a year after the bombing, and became a surprise sensation: the issue sold out almost as soon as it hit the stands, was reprinted as a special edition giveaway for U.S. Book of the Month Club subscribers, and went on to sell more than three million copies in book form . The piece’s title —  Hiroshima  — represented the intentions of its author, John Hersey ; that it is to say, it suggested an air of neutrality. Hersey’s article was not to be a clear-cut damnation of the bombing quoting facts and figures about casualties and the decimation of infrastructure. Rather it would be a sim...

I've just returned from Uganda - having spent 7 days in Kampala as part of the 2016 Writivism Festival. It was an exciting and interesting experience, and I'm currently gathering my thoughts to put together a post on my experiences and reflections of the festival. While I do that, I thought I'd share a bit of the festival through pictures. Enjoy! The funders and partners. The venue: Uganda museum Part of the awesome Writivism volunteer team. Early mornings! The books Ugandan literature The school visits   The Workshops   The book launches The evening performances - this one's a Long Story Short reading of 'Tropical Fish' 4 of the 5 Writivism Short Story Prize shortlisted writers + the performer who read 2 of the stories The readings - this one's for 'Safe House' Huza Press readings Ga...

The Guardian has a list of its five favorite on-campus novels, including  Jeffrey Eugenides ‘ The Marriage Plot , which we ran an excerpt of back when it came out, and Donna Tartt ‘s The Secret History , whose connections to the academy we’ve also explored on the site . The post Back to School appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bFBui2

Last week the literary web was abuzz with the news that the mysterious 15th-century Voynich Manuscript would be published in a limited run ; but why wait for that when you can see the manuscript yourself online  now? The post Get Your Rare Books Here appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bFBlet

On Monday we mentioned that the MTA has started offering free e-books underground as part of its Subway Reads program, but they weren’t the first to make books an integral part of the public transit experience. London’s Books on the Underground was first, but then came a more interesting development in Australia: book ninjas.  Books on the Rails  is a gonzo experiment started by two Melbourne residents who began releasing free books – actual, paper books – into the wilds of the city’s tram system. About 300 books are currently in circulation in what’s possibly the world’s most open lending library. The post Book Ninjas appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bBoU65

Very exciting news for space nerds: NASA just opened its research library to the public for free. Pair with our suggestions for the best fiction to send into space . The post To the Stars and Beyond appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bFABGb

Listen to the latest episode of  the  2 Dope Queens podcast, in which Year in Reading alum   Roxane Gay drops knowledge about how to write a killer memoir. The post A Toast to the Good Life appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bBnDfj

“I can locate the remnants of two or three abandoned cars that haven’t moved in a year, a couple of defunct pay phones, several tire piles, and at least one trashed couch that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.” Rob Walker on playing Pokémon Go in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. The post Catch ‘Em All appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2bFARVr

Hark now hear .Tintinnabulation of the wedding bells. Adaku my bride suanters down the aisle with another groom.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             ...