For your John Ashbery fix, PennSound has posted new videos and audio recordings of the poet’s recent readings.
David Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida are currently translating the memoir of a severely autistic Japanese boy, the Cloud Atlas author tells the Guardian. Naoki Higashida “tapped out the memoir letter by letter on an alphabet grid on a piece of cardboard” when he was only 13. The couple initially began translating the 2006 memoir for their own purposes—their son is autistic—when they realized it might have a wider appeal. “If I have any influence in the public narrative about autism,” Mitchell told the paper, “I'd like it to be this."
Fifty previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling have been discovered in the U.S. and will be published next month.
For devout readers with Dostoevskian emotional problems, the Center for Fiction is offering a service called “bibliotherapy”—a program “in which writers and editors involved with the center... will give you a 45-minute consultation dealing with the life crisis of your choice and prescribe a year’s worth of reading to help you get through it.”
Junot Diaz is on the shortlist for one of the world’s most remunerative literary prizes for his story “Miss Lora,” which appeared in his 2012 collection This is How You Lose Her. Diaz is competing against five other writers for the $45,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank short story award. The winner will be announced on March 22.
An infographic wondering (in so many words) whether Philip Roth is the most brilliant living American writer or the most brilliant American writer ever is generating a lot of irritable comments on New York Magazine’s website.
