Junot Diaz says he wrote his new illustrated children’s book, Islandborn, for his goddaughters, who were, like the charcters in the book, born in the Dominican Republic and now live in the Bronx. “If kids of color can read about white characters in children’s books all day, the only thing preventing the reverse is a malign set of racial policies,” Diaz tells the Washington Post. “The white default is, in some ways, the cornerstone of white supremacy. It’s not some innocent issue.”
At The Paris Review, poet and critic Stephanie Burt writes a letter to the future readers of Lucie Brock-Broido (Stay, Illusion), who died last week. “Just to read the poetry is to see—in its hypermetric lines, its cliff-face line breaks, its ‘gathering / Of foxes oddly standing still in the milk broth of oblivion’—how there was more to her and more in the poetry, more to consider (before reflecting) beautiful, and more to gather into the self for reflection than most poets, and most poetry, have in store.”
Murmrr—the Brooklyn reading series that has brought us events featuring Dana Spiotta, George Saunders, Sheila Heti, and Chris Kraus—is selling tickets for its upcoming event with musician and author Nick Cave, who will engage in a discussion with the audience.
According to Publishers Weekly, feminist bookstores are thriving in the Trump presidency.
Ex-Navy Seal Will Mackin talks about his debut story collection, Bring Out the Dog. “The idea for this particular book came out of the sensory details of the wars. When I was deploying with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan, our mission was night raids, and we wore night vision. There was a disconnect between the actual image and the image I was seeing in the goggles, and in some of the transmission—I could hear the guy next to me speaking on the radio, and a few seconds later I’d hear his voice in my head on delay. The voice would sound different but all the words were the same.”