Last week, Gary Shteyngart announced to the world via Twitter that he had finally finished Middlemarch. “I DID IT!!! I FINISHED MIDDLEMARCH!!! All you haters out there said I couldn't finish a book that long, but I did! HA HA HA! DOROTHEA 4EVER! P.S. Next I might read another long Britishy book like David Copperstein or whatever.” When interviewed about the accomplishment for the Daily News, Shteyngart told the paper, “I am never going to the Midlands.”
The Digital Public Library of America—which “brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world”—is now live.
High school teacher Matthew Thomas sold his 700-plus page debut novel We Are Not Ourselves to Simon and Schuster this week for a seven-figure advance. The novel, which was nicknamed the "the Irish epic," at the London book fair, is "a sprawling portrait of [an] Irish-American Leary family... as they move from Jackson Heights, Queens to Bronxville, New York in pursuit of the American dream.” It’s slated for publication in 2014.
A recording of Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan reading their excellent collaborative poem “Memorial Day” at the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project in 1971 has been found among the late poet Robert Creely’s “massive collection of reel-to-reel tapes.” You can hear it now at PennSound.
At Slate, Mason Currey publishes part of his in-depth study of the daily work habits of writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. What has he found so far? “A large number of novelists and poets, for instance, wake up early in the morning and try to get some words on the page before other obligations kick in. Composers, I've found, almost invariably take a long daily walk. And if you suspect that caffeine is the real engine of a good deal of creative activity, well, you may be on to something.”
Mina Loy, Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara are all featured in a new self-explanatory tumblr called Poets Without Clothes.
