TOBI'S DESK

If this winter is starting to feel endless, take some imagined advice from classic literary characters when dealing with seasonal affective disorder . Over at McSweeney’s, Allison Hirschlag puts together words of advice from Mrs. Dalloway (“plan a party”), Nick Carraway (“go on several benders”), and more. Although, we recommend you ignore Hamlet’s advice to challenge someone to a duel. Image credit: Frank E. Kleinschmidt – Library of Congress The post Seasonal Affective Disorder with Frankenstein appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2H3ZzSB

In our column Poetry Rx, readers  write in  with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets,  I recently got into a relationship with a wonderful, intelligent, caring man. I had been holding out on dating for a while, I was waiting for something to really click. Things are clicking with this person, but I am having a hard time deciphering if this is the kind of love I’ve been searching for. You know, the kind of love they write grand poems about. Maybe that type of love doesn’t exist, or maybe I am destined to be unsatisfied in matters of the heart. I know that love comes in many forms, but I can’t help being so afraid of ordinary love. Searching for a poem that offers insight into proving (or disproving) the old chestnut “when you know you know.” Sincerely, Defeatist Romantic ...

Gladys Bentley. Public domain. If Gladys Bentley’s life were an Oscar Micheaux film, it might open with a shot of the three-​story tenement house in Philadelphia in which the entertainer grew up. Four boys play in the alley behind the house. The camera settles on the eldest, distinguishing him from the others as the film’s protagonist, but not exaggerating any difference between him and the other boys. Nothing about the way he jumps from the top of the stairs to the bottom of the landing or shoves his young brother aside, which causes him to fall and to cry “Mama,” establishes or fixes the categories “boy” or “girl,” “brother” or “sister.” Or the story might start earlier, with a pair of empty hands filling the frame, but cut off from the body and suspended in the air, expectant. Then a shot of the young mother staring indifferently at an infant she cannot love and refuses to embrace, the rejection would be punctuated or underscored with dramatic music that would announce that this ...

The audiobook community audibly mourns the passing of one of its giants, Anthony Hollander, or “One-Take Tony” as he was known in the business. Whether narrating an epic, farce, or cozy mystery, his recordings all started the same: a clearing of the throat, a deep breath, and then the gruff-but-good-natured command to Scop, his dog, to vacate the studio. Hollander would then set to work reading, without interruption, one of the thousands of books he recorded over his career. “I’ve been reading since I was four years old. So why would I need multiple takes?” he told an interviewer in 2010. The sound of his gravelly baritone has transported readers from Hardy’s Wessex to Garcia-Marquez’s Macando. A more controversial figure than Flo Gibson, his longtime rival (and, some rumored, lover), he will be remembered not only for his recordings—including the definitive version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —but also for the narratorial intrusions that delighted and frustrated audiences...

In her monthly column,  Re-Covered , Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print books that shouldn’t be.  Photo © Lucy Scholes “Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta asked herself in the early seventies before she began writing what would become her first published novel: In the Ditch (1972). Closely based on Emecheta’s own life, it’s the story of Adah (the author’s fictional alter ego), a young Nigerian single mother living on a London council estate. Like the other “problem” families around her, Adah’s doing her very best, but life is a daily struggle. Unable to work because there’s no one else to look after her children, she’s entirely dependent on the welfare state. There’s never enough money to make ends meet, and the apartment block she lives in is a site of almost Dickensian squalor: the stairwells are “smelly with a thick lavatorial stink,” the trash chu...

Dark Juices and Afrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries Vol I is a collaboration anthology by HOLAAfrica, the curator Bel South, and GALA Archives. The following press release is by the anthology team members Tiffany Mugo & Bel South.  _________________________________________________________________________ What does queer desire look like? What is it to lust and love on the margins? The questions above are not […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2XsqCwx

When The Good Immigrant —a collection of 20 essays by first- and second-generation immigrants—was published in the U.K. in September of 2016, no one, including the anthology’s editor, Nikesh Shukla , expected the book to take off in the way in it did. “It’s amazing to think about where it’s got to now,” says Shukla. “At the time, I thought I was just doing a little project to put some writers together and put them in front of publishers to say—‘you keep saying you don’t know where the talent is, that’s why publishing’s not very diverse. Here are 20 writers you need to know about’—but then it sort of blew up. It blew up in this really pure, beautiful way, and now it’s become big.” Originally created via the London-based crowdfunding publisher Unbound in 2016—author J.K. Rowling pledged £500— The Good Immigrant quickly became a U.K. bestseller, and was chosen as a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week before winning the Readers’ Choice award at the annual UK Books Are My Bag Award. I firs...

Sarah Ladipo Manyinka’s debut novel In Dependence was published in 2009 by Cassava Republic Press and has since sold more than three million copies in Nigeria. To mark the novel’s 10th anniversary, Cassava Republic will be reissuing it on 14 May 2019. Here is a synopsis: It is the early-sixties when a young Tayo Ajayi sails […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2UgCnV2

“In poetry, I realized again and again that ‘failures’ were in fact openings to more possibilities.” Emily Yoon reflects on the poetic consequences of K-Pop for the Paris Review . K-Pop, with its “beautiful cinematography and puzzling stories, dazzling choreography, jazzy outfits, dashing looks, catchy tunes, and gender performances that maybe seem refreshing and hopeful to an American audience,” steadily grows in popularity outside of Korea, causing Yoon to wonder if the foreignness of language is part of the attraction. Image credit: Official album cover for BTS’s Love Yourself Answer The post The Poetics of K-Pop appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2NwoYW8

  Sonnet III after Kazim Ali The family inside at the dinner table is no longer mine. It’s been three years since I opened that door & lost a tooth. Everyone ate silence; mum avoided looking at my lips – Our hands on the cold glass minutes before thunder quivered. I am in the news […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2IEMD7T

  The oracle of Griddock had warned that Zakari would be the one to lead the entire village to Lucifer’s Gate, and any time the oracle spoke it was imminent. His prophecies didn’t come without a way out, though. This time he’d carved it in the flesh of an old woman, just below her left […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2TiRjV5

  Content Warning: This story contains depictions of physical and sexual violence.   It was typical of Thursdays to be lazy and boring for me unless mum was off at work, then we would stay at home together and do all the gossips. She had left for work that morning almost before I could see her. […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2IIr7PJ

I read like a buzz saw cuts wood. A book a day is not unusual, and my discard pile is always bigger than the unread pile. Because new books are expensive, I buy my books online , at Goodwill, and at library sales. I seldom have to pay more than a few dollars. In the past few years I have discovered an added benefit, besides not bankrupting myself, to acquiring books secondhand. Many of the used books I buy have something left inside of them by their former owners. Here are some things I have found: a Seattle traffic ticket for jaywalking, the luggage slip for a first class flight to Paris, to-do lists with some very curious items like “pick up the whip” or “explain cremation.” Often I find ticket stubs ( Hamilton !). Once I found a check fully made out for $375.15 dollars that was never given away, and just today I found a yellow card from Pacific Photo Express that offered to transform my images into a “photo fun button.” I am not sure I want such a pin: the illustration shows a...

During my last two years of college in Chicago, I rode downtown by commuter train a few times each week. The trip took about 40 minutes, and I always brought a book to pass the time. I read most of Thomas Mann ’s The Magic Mountain on the tracks between the Loop and the Davis Street stop. I paged through The Satanic Verses that way too. These were strange book choices, but I was a strange reader. I never felt like I had read the right books. Everyone else seemed to have read everything. I was so far behind I had no idea where to start. I had hunger, but no sense of taste. I certainly got no guidance from what other people on the train were reading. My fellow riders seemed to subsist on the Trib or Wall Street Journal alone. No novels other than the occasional Scott Turow or John Grisham . This was the golden age of the courtroom potboiler. I didn’t understand the priorities of these people whose lives were swarmed with mortgages, kids, and 401(k)s. In 1998, I came to New York f...

Artist, Henry William Pickersgill; Engraved by D. H. Robinson, L.E.L. , 1852 Not many people know what happened to English literature between the end of the Romantics and the beginning of the Victorians. This troubling era in British cultural history has never been given a name; it’s been called a “strange pause” and an “indeterminate borderland,” and dismissed as a tedious “flat calm” during which nothing much happened. It was certainly strange, and its literary voices were indeed indeterminate—often calculatedly so, making their tone hard for the modern reader to pin down. But the one thing British publishing culture was decidedly not during the 1820s and 1830s was calm, as is demonstrated in the rise and fall of the prolific poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Known by her initials “L.E.L.” and called the “female Byron” in her day, she was born in London in 1802, and found dead in 1838, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, a few weeks after arriving at Cape Coast Castl...