Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, whose work explores "themes of nature, isolation and identity" has won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ethan Nosowsky, most recently the editor-at-large of Graywolf Press and formerly of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Creative Capital Foundation, is now McSweeney’s editorial director.
In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zach Baron heads to Sin City in search of Thompson’s ghost. “Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really,” Baron writes in the first of his four-part series. “It is our World Series of Poker, except more pretentious.”
Hey, Richard Prince, what was it like to visit Bob Dylan’s studio? “I’m not going to tell you exactly where it was, but getting to his studio was like that scene in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta parks his car outside a nightclub... I think it’s Copacabana... and goes in a side entrance, down a hall past a lazy-ass watchman, into the kitchen, through another hallway, and out into the main room and ends up right next to the maître d’, who then ignores the people in line waiting to get in and hugs and kisses Ray and his girlfriend and shows them right down in front of the stage, where a small table, two chairs, and a plug-in lamp suddenly, miraculously, appear.”
The Digital Public Library of America is now live, and open for business.
Is it possible to impose a narrative on “digital pasts”? To sift through enormous amounts of data—what somebody Tweeted a year ago, where they checked in on FourSquare—and create what Clive Thompson calls “useful memories?” More companies think it is, Thompson argues in Wired, comparing the field to “geolocation as a Proustian cookie.”
The Poetry Foundation unearths Upton Uxbridge Underwood’s forgotten classic Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, which not only makes good on its title, but also presents its own system of beard classification.
