The National Book Awards longlist for poetry was announced today, following the list for young people’s literature and books in translation, which were announced yesterday. The nominated poets include Martín Espada, Desiree C. Bailey, Forrest Gander, and Jackie Wang, among others. The nonfiction longlist is expected later this afternoon.
At the Yale Review, new fiction from Brandon Taylor.
For Lit Hub, Jen DeGregorio looks into the story behind a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair, which is selling for $450,000. Is the sample real? Was it stolen? The answers involve the poet James Merril, who is said to have broken into one of the Dickinson estate’s houses as an undergraduate, and a rare-book collector who is trying to sell the alleged lock on Ebay in an attempt to pay off his student loans.
For AnOther magazine, Lauren Elkin talks about her new book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, a literary take on taking the bus: “One thing I write about is the difference between the everyday and the event—these moments of what [Georges] Perec calls the extraordinary as opposed to the infra-ordinary. Those are moments when we’re all thinking the same thing.”
At Balls and Strikes, a new site dedicated to court reporting, editor-in-chief Jay Willis writes about how legal journalism is failing to accurately convey the Supreme Court’s radical right takeover: “A conservative supermajority doing standard-issue conservative supermajority things . . . poses something of an existential crisis for the legal commentary industrial complex.”