At The Paris Review, recently hired editor Lorin Stein and poetry editor Robyn Creswell are rejecting some poems that their predecessors had accepted. Daniel Nester is reporting on the debacle, which he's dubbed "The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010," over at the blog We Who Are About to Die. (Meanwhile, Blake Butler pens a satirical list of Paris Review rejects, and the Poetry Foundation scratches its chin while pondering the matter.) For a glimpse of some authors Stein does like, check out his spirited appraisal of five books that should be in any reviewer's library.
When your computer crashes, what do you do? Throw your hands up in frustration, gnash your teeth, cry? You could write a story instead, as Garrett Murray does, and turn the crash report into literary gold.
Red state cinema: Thomas Frank's 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?, which details how "conservatives won the heart of America," has been adapted into a film (surely that state's citizens must be sick of the question by now). If you're in New York next week, you can watch Frank discuss the movie with co-director Joe Winston on July 28 and catch a screening on July 30.
Over at Publishers Weekly, Craig Morgan Teicher, the author of Cradle Book and formerly the man behind Galleycat's eBookNewser, has launched an excellent new blog, PWxyz, where he wittily covers all things bookish, including top-notch dispatches from the digital publishing frontier.
