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“Books tend to get short shrift in the cultural world,” says Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, in this interview with James Brown. Lucas speaks about the foundation’s goal to promote a love of writing and the BookUp program, which connects young people with published authors and provides free copies of books.
Barnes & Noble names Demos Parneros as its new CEO; Michelle Dean on Granta’s “Best American Young Novelists” and the conflicting impulses of American fiction writers; Major Jackson’s “Renga for Obama” to conclude this Sunday; and other news.
Three current Monopoly board game tokens—the boot, the thimble, and the wheelbarrow—will be cycled out this fall and replaced with a penguin, a rubber ducky, and a T-Rex. Classic board games often get continually updated with new features, and brand new games are constantly created, but most of us have favorites and personal memories of playing board games in the past. Write an essay that focuses on an old board game you’ve held onto, or explores memories of playing, arguing, and competing with friends and family during game nights.
Viet Thanh Nguyen makes a case against the writing workshop; tracing the origins of well-known quotes; Mohammed Hasan Alwan wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction; and other news.
Robert M. Pirsig has died; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt makes another round of layoffs; Monica Youn on poetry, women, and property; and other news.
Theater company commissions thirty-eight new Shakespeare-inspired plays; what the Proto-Indo-European language may have sounded like; the growth of explicitly political poetry; and other news.
Man Booker International Prize shortlist announced; Bill O’Reilly’s 1998 novel about a fired TV newsman; the subjectivity of literary taste; and other news.
Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown Publishing Group, 2010), which explores the life and legacy of an African American woman whose cells became the basis of numerous scientific breakthroughs, has been adapted into a television movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne.
Henry Holt to continue publishing Bill O’Reilly; the process of adding words to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai to publish picture book; and other news.
“Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence,” writes Harryette Mullen in Trimmings (Tender Button Books, 1991). Mia You considers these words and the intersection of the body, language, and fashion in her essay “Sublime Deformations of Nature.” Write your own essay exploring thoughts, experiences, and inspirations on the relationship between language and fashion. How does this influence your ideas on what a body is?
