TOBI'S DESK

Any argument about poetry is one worth having. So it’s been equally thrilling and disappointing to see recent debates decrying the proliferation of “artless” poetry in a market irrevocably changed by social media. A particularly scathing review of Hollie McNish ’s Plum has now further inflamed the debate. Rebecca Watts ’s article in the PN Review ’s latest issue has inspired some heated responses. There isn’t much in the original piece that hasn’t been written or insinuated before, especially concerning the poet Rupi Kaur ’s meteoric rise. If I had a bitcoin for every time I heard social media is dumbing us down, I could buy shares in Amazon. What really caught my attention, however, was something else; the refashioning of a longstanding brand of exclusivity as a minority position. Repeating age-old prejudices while casting oneself as a beleaguered truth-teller is truly a feat to behold. As an admittedly “young female poet” hell-bent on destroying poetry, I felt it was only right to ...

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . This week, we bring you Benjamin Nugent ’s story “God,”  Rowan Ricardo Phillips ’s poem “Kingdom Come,” and Kristin Dombek ’s “Letter from Williamsburg.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the ninth episode of our podcast, “ God, Etc. ” And if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts by  subscribing on iTunes . While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. “God,” by Benjamin Nugent Issue no. 206 (Fall 2013) We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends. Caleb was the president of our frat...

1. “When I was ten,” Morgan Jerkins writes in the essay that opens This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America , “the only thing I wanted to be was a white cheerleader.”  She has trained for this.  Her mother taught her to mind her blackness, to keep it under wraps unless she is in all-black company: at church, or a family cook-out.  In the “wider white world,” her mother warns, she must mind her dialect, keep her voice down, tame her hair, fasten up her clothes.  “If I wanted to achieve any kind of success,” she was schooled, “I first had to recognize that success was a white domain.”  While she is friends with both black and white girls, at school she maintains a difficult rapport with the girls who “act” black, segregated not only by her class placement (in college-prep rather than remedial courses), but by the preppy clothes her mother insists on dressing her in: plaid skirts, argyle socks. When the ...

  Mirtha Dermisache, Spread from Libro No. 1, 1972. From Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings.   No importa lo que pasa en la hoja de papel, lo importante es lo que pasa dentro nuestro.  It’s not important what happens on a sheet of paper, the important thing is what happens within us. — Mirtha Dermisache Despots, from those who composed the efficiently murderous junta that ruled Argentina to the petty kakistocracy that runs the United States today, curb the written word because they fear its expressive power. They haven’t learned that what they should fear is not written language but, instead, the very impulse to write. It is more prevailing than literature, capable of surviving where art cannot. The writings and artistic practice of Mirtha Dermisache are a testament to this. Her work, which she created while living under the junta in Argentina, is lasting and subversive even though she barely penned a legible word. One could argue that writing is a s...

  Still from A  Streetcar Named Desire.   There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois’s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire . This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand—that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it. And if she is the ultimate actor, she possesses the ultimate stage prop: her trunk. This object is baggage, furniture, and character all at once, a heavy and unwieldy onstage presence that mirrors Blanche’s own frail but nonetheless steely physicality. In the opening scene of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation—he had also directed the Broadway production of the play with Jessica Tandy as Blanche, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947—Vivien Leigh’s Blanche emerges from the steam in the railway station carrying only a small ...

The Miles Morland Foundation marked its fifth anniversary last year. Founded in 2013, the Foundation is best-known for its Writing Scholarships: fiction (£18,000 to two, three or four writers over the course of twelve months) and nonfiction (£27,000 to a single writer over the course of eighteen months) grants paid to allow the winning scholars […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2Eook8G

Chigozie Obioma, on Facebook days ago, unveiled the cover for his forthcoming second novel, the beautifully-titled An Orchestra of Minorities. We do not know who the cover designer is but this is a beautiful one. In May 2017, we announced the book’s acquisition by Little, Brown for release in 2019. That date, however, has changed: An […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2DKINDy

The 2018 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets has been awarded to Botswana’s Tjawangwa (TJ) Dema, for her collection, The Careless Seamstress. In addition to receiving the $1000 prize money, Dema’s manuscript will be published in the spring of 2019 as part of the African Poetry Book Series by the University of Nebraska Press. The finalists are: Nawal […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2EoLADg

Changes are taking place at the Miles Morland Foundation: Michela Wrong has stepped down from her role as Literary Director, a position she took up in 2014, while the Foundation’s former Secretary, Mathilda Edwards, has assumed the new role of Foundation Manager. Founded in 2013 by Miles Morland, who is British, the Miles Morland Foundation is […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2DHTzKz

1. I pulled the heavy red book down from my dad’s bookshelf. Bryan A. Garner ’s A Dictionary of Modern American U sage , its cover announced. “ David Foster Wallace said it’s the only usage guide he ever consulted,” my dad said, a note of pride in his voice as if he and DFW had been old buddies. “I got it on sale at The Strand.” “Huh,” I said and sat down, opening the tome on my lap to the word “eventuate,” the subject of a controversial debate with a coworker at my day job. The entry was short and snarky: Eventuate is ‘an elaborate journalistic word that can usually be replaced by a simpler word to advantage.’ George P. Krapp , A Comprehensive Guide to Good English (1927). Then came several examples of its misuse, explanations of what was wrong about it, and suggestions for words should have been used in it place (e.g., “happened,” “occurred,” “took place”). This comprehensive lesson perfectly resolved my confusion, since I had misconstrued the meaning of “eventuate” as som...

Out this week:  This Will Be My Undoing   by  Morgan  Jerkins ;  In Every Moment We Are Still Alive  by  Tom Malmquist ;  The Winter Station   by  Jody Shields ; and  The Monk of Mokha  by  Dave Eggers . Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Go read our  most recent book preview . Want to help  The Millions  keep churning out great books coverage? Sign up to be a member  today. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Jerkins; Malmquist; Shields; Eggers appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2DOgqZc

The aphorisms below are plucked from Muriel Spark’s works of fiction. In the words of Penelope Jardin, editor of  The Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark, “ That doesn’t mean either that Dame Muriel did not actually think what she says here and perhaps means it very much.” A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn’t got a chance.  I think waiter is such a funny word. It is we who wait. How can she truly love? She’s too timid to hate well, let alone love. It takes courage to practice love. Literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls. How seldom one falls in love with the lovable … How seldom … Hardly ever. How do you know when you’re in love? The traffic in the city improves, and the cost of living seems to be very low.  Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone, and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.  Ridicule i...

Edgar Ramírez as Gianni Versace in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace .   In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college (such things were possible in the late nineties). The gig itself was worlds away from my current occupation as a crime writer. “Inventory asset management” was the vague, jargony title that described the mix of my duties: lifting heavy objects—furniture, office supplies—and computer data entry. It was meant to be tedious, a spirit confirmed by the office’s gray cubicles, the recycled air, and the lack of ambition among my colleagues. But my mornings were not boring. I began my summer gig the first week of July, and within a week I had developed a lively routine. One of my coworkers—perhaps even my then boss—left a stack of printouts at my desk. The...