Another alt weekly announces its demise: the New York Press goes under.
Incoming freshmen at Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are spending their summer reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals; first-years at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., are learning about Mexico’s Tarahumara distance runners via Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; and come September, new Cornell students will discuss Homer & Langley, E. L. Doctorow’s novel about “two infamous packrats who were found dead in their Harlem brownstone in 1947 surrounded by more than 100 tons of accumulated stuff."
In honor of National Bad Poetry Day, Houston poet Rich Levy has endeavored to write the worst poem ever. It’s titled ‘The Nightingale and the Other Bird,’ and it begins, “Once upon a time, a bird flew to the top of a tree / It saw a caterpillar on bended knee / Which was odd for caterpillars don't have knees you see.” The rest is available here.
To promote Hooked, a forthcoming, anonymously-written novel about “a group of middle-aged men in an unnamed city as they travel around from brothel to brothel acting out various indiscretions,” publisher Tin House has set up a Tumblr page asking readers to anonymously share “stories and secrets” about their sex lives.
In a video for Wallpaper, publisher Gerhard Steidl explains how he makes his beautiful, beautiful art books.
Debut novelist Rebecca Searle might see her forthcoming adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, When You Were Mine, in movie theaters before bookstores.
