Amazon has launched a new imprint for literary fiction called “Little a,” which is kicking off with a logo designed by Chip Kidd, and fiction by A.L. Kennedy, James Franco, and Bookforum contributor Jenny Davidson.
What exactly is Anne Carson? The New York Times Magazine profiles the hard-to-classify writer in the most intimate way she’ll allow: through email. Sam Anderson writes: “As an e-mail correspondent, Carson was prompt and friendly but slightly unorthodox. She wrote almost entirely in lowercase letters. Her punctuation was irregular. Some questions she answered with several hundred words, others with only one or two (‘no pets’). Others she ignored altogether.”
A college English assignment about poet Jupiter Hammon led a student to discover a previously unpublished poem by the 18th-century African American author in the Yale University archives. The poem is dated 1786 and titled "An Essay on Slavery: Justification to Divine Providence, Knowing that God Rules Over All Things."
Here’s a coffee-stained list of 81 books that Donald Barthelme considers “essential for a literary education.” Unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of Hawkes, Gass, and Barth on the syllabus.
An eleven-year-old girl named Lauren has raised more than $5,500 on Kickstarter to self-publish her first book, The Clown That Lost His Funny.
