The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
The poetry longlist for the 2014 National Book Awards includes collections from Claudia Rankine, Fanny Howe, Edward Hirsch and former U.S. Poet Laureates Louise Glück and Mark Strand. The National Book Foundation said in a press release: "The Longlisted books range in style and content: from a single elegiac narrative poem to a provocative examination of race relations told in an experimental fusion of lyric, prose poems, and image." It is the second of four longlists being released this week — Young People's Literature was announced yesterday, and Nonfiction and Fiction will be announced Wednesday and Thursday. The shortlists will be announced in October and the winners on Nov. 19. The full poetry longlist is:
Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion
Brian Blanchfield, A Several World
Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night
Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem
Fanny Howe, Second Childhood
Maureen N. McLane, This Blue
Fred Moten, The Feel Trio
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus
Mark Strand, Collected Poems
In an essay in The New Statesman,Booker-nominated author Will Self rails against hipster culture. But don't feel too bad, hipsters — he also dislikes George Orwell, grits, crowdfunding, artisanal potato chips ("death discs"), muzak, social media and Emma Watson. (He does, however, enjoy jam.)
Kevin Holden has a new poem, "Bees," in The New Yorker:
"Bees in Virgil — something silver and secret,
Like lightning over the land
Or striking a plum tree on some dried hill."
More than a dozen recently discovered letters by Jack Kerouac will be auctioned off in November. The Los Angeles Times' Carolyn Kellogg reports: "Typed and single-spaced, the letters often have a frenetic, breathless quality. Written by Kerouac as early as high school, they show, in part, the development of the writing style that would make him the most famous novelist of the Beat Generation."
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