Arts journal Her Royal Majesty has reprinted Alice Munro’s first published story, “Dimensions of a Shadow,” after discovering it in the University of Western Ontario’s college literary magazine Folio. The story isn’t available online, but the first few paragraphs are at the Paris Review Daily.
Caleb Crain considers the evolution of modern slang: “Like poetry and pornography, slang is easier to recognize than to define.”
Today in seventy-year-old scandals: The Guardian has revealed Federico Garcia Lorca’s erstwhile lover to be art critic Juan Ramirez de Lucas. Lorca wrote “passionate verse” to the young critic before the poet was killed in the Spanish Civil War, but his lover’s identity was not revealed until now. In 2010, the critic gave his sister a box of of their correspondence shortly before his death.
John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, which he lived in until he was thirteen, is going to become a museum. The John Updike Society paid $200,000 for the property, which they hope will become “a destination for writers and scholars.”
Manohla Dargis reviews director Cristian Jimenez’s adaptation of Bonsai, a film based on Alejandro Zambra’s novella.
Norton has put together a list of all their editors who use Twitter.
Here’s an audio recording of John Ashbery reading at the 92Y Poetry Center, just before he turned 25.
