Friday Lit Links — Week of June 1
News, Reviews, and Interviews
Aminatta Forna’s new novel Happiness is getting rave reviews. Forna recently contributed to our November 2017 issue as part of our Puterbaugh Essay Series.
2012 Puterbaugh Fellow and 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize winner Marina Carr’s play Woman and a Scarecrow is showing now in New York. It is a “blistering beauty of a play that rages with regret.”
A documentary on the life of spec-lit writer Ursula K. Le Guin hits the festival scene this year and will air on PBS in 2019. The Guardian has an early look at the trailer for the crowdfunded film.
Speaking of spec-lit, we’re massive Twin Peaks obsessives here at WLT, and Paste had this nifty article about why it is that the US Pacific Northwest is seemingly such a hotbed setting for the genre. Electric Lit also had this interesting look at progressive gender dynamics in sci-fi.
LitHub brings us this excerpt from Fiona Sampson’s new nonfiction work, In Search of Mary Shelley, which examines, in part, the rocky beginnings of her marriage to Percy Shelley.
Herbert Gold was interviewed for the Paris Review. Gold, while not as conventionally successful a writer as his mid-twentieth-century cohorts Bellow and Nabokov, was respected among his peers. His new book of poetry, Nearing the Exit, is out now.
Fight Club scribe and mid-1990s Gen X messiah Chuck Palahniuk says he’s nearly bankrupt after his literary agency suffered a disastrous embezzlement scheme.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
Philip Metres, writing for the Boston Review, brings this enlightening look at Arab American poetry in the modern social theater. From the WLT archives, check out David Williams’s article covering similar terrain, “This Hyphen Called My Spinal Cord.”
The Globe & Mail investigates why exactly the lit scene in Quebec is, seemingly, so much more . . . something else than in other parts of Canada.
Walt Whitman would have been a ripe 199 this week were he to somehow possess such powers, and less-than-flattering critiques of Leaves of Grass open up this New Yorker article on the big business of fake reviews.
And finally, Largehearted Boy cuts a mean and summery playlist to accompany Cutter Wood’s new book of creative nonfiction, Love and Death in the Sunshine State.
