This is way more like it! August 31, 2016

Enter an Archive of 6,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized and Free to Read Online

The Subversive Superheros of Indie Comics

So, will Karl Urban be in this? Or Sala Baker? (important questions)

Also THIS BOOK LOOKS AMAZING

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, continuing to set the bar for being a human ever higher. Bless.

Oxford Dictionaries halts search for most disliked word after 'severe misuse'

Porter Square Books Launches Virtual Bookseller

Rona Jaffe Winners Announced for 2016 (also a list of women whose work needs to be read nowrightnow thank you very much): Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas and Danielle Geller for nonfiction, Jamey Hatley, Ladee Hubbard, and Asako Serizawa for fiction, and Airea D. Matthews for poetry

How To Sell Nearly a Half-Million Copies of a Poetry Book - specifically Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur 

Washington University in St. Louis will host the third annual Transgender Spectrum Conference Friday, November 4th and Saturday, November 5th, 2016.

What Does It Mean to be a Poet in the Face of Violence?

The Lost Art of Custom-Illustrating Your Favorite Books

12 of the Best Essay Collections for Your Fall Reading

Who Gets to Decide What Counts as "English"?

Becoming a Writer Means Becoming a Cliche

The Great Booksellers Fall 2016 Preview - this list includes Kea Wilson, bookseller at Left Bank Books who gets to go through the utterly unnerving experience of her very first book launch on September 6th. Bwahahaha!

Important reading August 25th, 2016

N. K. Jemisin on Diversity in Science Fiction and Inspiration From Dreams

Welcome to Planet Havana

The Italian government is giving teens €500 on their 18th birthday to spend on books

One third of parents avoid reading children scary stories, study finds

‘Last Week Tonight’: John Oliver Turned a 20-Year-Old Kids’ Book with ‘Startling Parallels’ to Trump into a Bestseller

Is this really all you people could come up with for me to read today?

A Poet’s Ambivalence at Work

Radical Flâneuserie

I'ma dig through LitHub later, because this is insane.

August 24th List of articles I won't read today but want to...

How to Write While Traveling

The Woman Who Launched a Newspaper During WWII

The Joys and Dangers of Walking While Black

Teju Cole: The Book That Changed My Life

Five Books Making the News This Week

Helen Macdonald: ​the unsettling encounter that inspired H is for Hawk

Bulky, heavy, pricey - yet flourishing. Art catalogs keep print alive in the digital era

Interview with a Bookstore: Oxford Exchange

To read August 17, 2016

Granta Contributor Targeted in Anti-Gay Attacks

“When We Was Fierce” Pulled as Demand Grows for More #OwnVoices Stories

#Women_writers manifesto aims to build community of female authors

Librarians Have an Olympics, Too

The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Thirty-Seventh Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS - As Cliff says "See, somebody's doing the work." Also, Trace is on this list and you all need to read that book for real.

Tana Wojczuk: The Vanity of Crowds: Populism in Shakespeare's Coriolanus

Kristin Dombek on the New Narcissism Talking Selfies, Pyschology and God with the Author of The Selfishness of Others

Nadja Spiegelman on Storytelling, France, and a Mother’s Love

Also, I did stay up until some hour that I did not check on because I knew it was too late reading The Obelisk Gate and I have many thoughts and feelings and words and some of them are about the story (OMG) and some of them are about falling in love with an author (because it has been awhile, y'all)(NK Jemisin, y'all) and some of them are about being a writer and reading (so many words, so many many many words) and some of them are about where are the copycats (I NEED MORE OF THIS PLEASE NOW THANK YOU) and some of them are forming into the sentence that means that I will go to wherever the launch is for the third book in this series and that may become a plan, I don't know yet, but it has happened at least in letters in my head, so.

Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation

Colson Whitehead: 'My agent said: Oprah. I said: Shut the front door'

List of things for August 16th, 2016

The Lenny Interview: Lidia Yuknavitch

Every Day, a Funeral: Jenny Zhang and Nate Brown in Conversation

YA Author Wisdom: Sandra Cisneros

Teju Cole’s Essays Build Connections Between African and Western Art

Five Books Making News This Week, Floods, Ponds and Grief - which link I must follow up with an observation that I am done DONE with people comparing Bennett's book Pond to anything by Knausgaard (whose monster of a masterpiece I love, btw, although even if I didn't, I would still make the case) on account of it is much more like Joyce (seeing as how he's an Irish writer also writing highly fantastical stuff for an interior narrative) and I think it's crazy lazy not to acknowledge that relationship. That said, there are reviewers who are doing the work of finding other, more reasonable comparisons to make. This is rambly. I've had a bunch of coffee is all.

Analytic Rage: The Genius of Jenny Diski - this weekend, I saw On Gratitude on the shelf and was blindsided by the news of Diski's inoperable lung cancer. I've not read anything other than Stranger on a Train by her, but that I loved and while I am more than a little put off by the boring font (it's less superficial than you might think), I am bracing myself for this book. 

Went and listened to poems last night. Having many feelingthoughts about the body and women's poetry and where we live in our words and how I am not sad to leave straight white cisgendered men's words in a ditch at the side of my bookshelves forever.

Also Happy Birthday to a dear dear dear dear friend for whom my heart ribbits happily and who will ever have custody of the best of my brain.

The Obelisk Gate is out today. Are you reading it? Don't tell me! I can't yet. I have groups and things. Thursday, though. Thursday it will happen!

To read August 11, 2016

MY BODY IS READY: The Moral Arc of N.K. Jemisin's Universe Bends Toward Apocalypse
(The Obelisk Gate comes out on Tuesday and I am desperately impatient but it will be fine I swear really it's only life-changing and perfection)

N.K. Jemisin on Why—and How—to Create Diversity in Science Fiction
Surviving the Survival: Ocean Vuong on exploring fear, his family, and why turning your back on your work is a good idea.

Scoping Out Comic-Con With Lord of the Rings Superfan Margaret Atwood

Ode to the Tampon

The horror of female adolescence – and how to write about it

Decolonise, not Diversify

Also, I read Pond last night. The whole thing. One night. Mind = blown to glitter bits. Pond is a debut novel that takes place entirely within the thinking layers and words of a woman who lives by herself mostly and sort of does things and sort of doesn't do things and it's all very familiar and strange and ultimately incredibly unsettling in the way that only the most unknown normalcy can be. Imagine a travelogue to someone else's dream-scape translated into your day to day. Only it's not a dream, mostly, and she's not really trying to make you comfortable.

Claire-Louise Bennett offers us a character whose vocabulary is broad and giddy, and whose interests spill far far away from the edges of this bit of her living that we are shown. It is an incredible novel, best explored over something buttery, perhaps cut with a poem or two. For texture. Excellent late summer reading.

CD Wright's Cooling Time leapt off of the used poetry shelf at me the other day, so I took it home and we have Shared Some Moments, I tell you what. 

To read August 10, 2016

Black science fiction writers face 'universal' racism, study finds

Diversity In Book Publishing Isn't Just About Writers — Marketing Matters, Too

Is It Story That Makes Us Read?

Malafemmena (review)

Podcast: Stacy Mitchell on How Big-Box Retailers Undercut the American Middle Class

Black-owned banks get rush of new depositors

Black Protest Writing, From W.E.B. Du Bois to Kendrick Lamar

How to Survive as an American Writer in Bulgaria

On order for me: Volume 1 of Black Panther out in September, and The Cruel Way originally published in 1947.

From the galley shelves: Girl Trouble by Kerry Cohen out in October and What is Love by Carrie Jenkins out in January 2017

Currently chomping at the bit for The Obelisk Gate which I won't be able to read for many days because of book group the night the book is released and also writing group the night after (because after lo these many years, I am finally going to go to writing group) and then I will probably get up very early on Thursday and just drown in the book and that is fine by me.

A poem:

"On my persistent need to address others by full first name" by Meg Matich