Bill Cheng's Blog, page 29
June 12, 2014
Josh White - Hard Time Blues
Josh White - Hard Time Blues
June 9, 2014
2014 Longlist - The Frank O'Connor
This makes for a pretty great summer reading list. Proud to see so many authors included who we have had the honor of publishing in the magazine.
An extra big shout out to Jodi Angel (You Only Get Letters from Jail, Tin House Books)!!!!
And hurray to Phil Klay!
June 8, 2014
theparisreview:
A manuscript page by William Stafford, from his...
A manuscript page by William Stafford, from his 1993 Art of Poetry interview.
His son Kim included the following note: “He wrote the poem at Yaddo, then sent it to many magazines. The Paris Review is one of almost a dozen who rejected what eventually became the title poem in his collection, Traveling Through the Dark, which won the National Book Award in 1962. I believe my father would have enjoyed the irony, as I hope you do, of this poem appearing in this form in Paris Review lo these thirty-five years later.”
"I wrote a good omelet…and ate
a hot poem… after loving you
Buttoned my car…and drove my
coat..."
I wrote a good omelet…and ate
a hot poem… after loving you
Buttoned my car…and drove my
coat home…in the rain…
after loving you
I goed on red…and stopped on
green…floating somewhere in between…
being here and being there…
after loving you
I rolled my bed…turned down
my hair…slightly
confused but…I don’t care…
Laid out my teeth…and gargled my
gown…then I stood
…and laid me down…
To sleep…
after loving you
- nikki giovanni, i wrote a good omelet. (via ethiopienne)
hmhbooks:
harperperennial:
overlookpress:
Love these Bob...
Love these Bob Eckstein drawings of his favorite bookstores in New York! Can’t wait for the second installment! via The New Yorker
Love love love
Pretttttty.
June 6, 2014
Guernica: What do you make of the American preoccupation with memoir and the autobiography? Novelists will write a book in the first person and many readers will think, “That has to have happened to them in real life.”
Ayad Akhtar: Especially if you’re a writer of color or if you’re a woman. Because if you fall into either of those categories, you’re expected to be writing of your experience. But if you’re not, then you can write about anything.
It’s always perplexing to me, the ways in which my own autobiography has found its way into my work. And it’s often very misleading. I’ll take details, and they are working in the opposite way from which they existed in my life. The story begins to have its own demands-- I need this, that, and the other, and I could use this thing, but I have to change it. And so that comes into the story, and it has the register of authentic life, and people think, of course, it must have happened exactly like that.
They’re going to get confused if they keep reading what I’m working on. They’ll think, “How can he be that-- and that? It doesn’t make any sense!”
