Joy Harjo has been named US Poet Laureate for the second time. Harjo plans to spend her second term focusing on creating “a digital interactive map featuring contemporary Native poets, including videos of them reading their work.”
The New York Times’s Gal Beckerman analyzes celebrity bookshelves as they appear in quarantine broadcasts. “A stranger’s collection is to us a window to their soul,” he writes. “We peruse with judgment, sometimes admiration and occasionally repulsion.”
Read an excerpt from Greil Marcus’s new book, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby, at Literary Hub.
“I’m more or less always working, so there’s not really an answer to a question like, ‘What do you read (or avoid reading) when you’re writing?”’ The Hours author Michael Cunningham tells the Times By the Book column. “It’s a little like asking a fish, ‘So, what do you do when you’re not in the water?’”
Tribune Publishing employees staged a digital protest on Slack, bombarding top executives with messages after the company announced furloughs and pay cuts. According to Vice, “veterans and rookies alike criticized the company for squeezing workers dry while continuing to line shareholders’ pockets,” while others “shared personal testimonials about what it would mean to have their salaries slashed.” Although executives did not respond—one even “deactivated his Slack account, so that he was no longer able to be tagged in the messages”—company representatives warned “employees that if they ever pulled a stunt like this again they could be disciplined for misuse of company property.”
French director Régis Roinsard is making a film inspired by the experiences of Dan Brown’s translators. The Guardian reports that in order to avoid leaks, translators of Brown’s fourth novel, Inferno, were flown to Milan and put in a room at the headquarters of Italian publisher Gruppo Mondadori, where as translator Carole Delporte remembered, “in an Olympic Games–like gesture,” they worked on the book behind “a little flag on each desk indicating the various languages involved.” The room was protected by armed guards, translators had limited internet connection, and they were made to lock the manuscripts they worked from in a safe each night. “You need people who are psychologically strong,” she said. “Working in a bunker for a month and a half is a very unusual experience.”
