The 2013 Believer Book Award goes to Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories. Karen Green’s Bough Down wins for poetry.
The Academy of American Poets has a new website, which highlights their refurbished Poem-A-Day feature and has the nice option of isolating the poem on the page, uncrowded by boxes or menus or sidebars. Yesterday’s poem was Catie Rosemurgy’s “Star in the Throat, Fire in the Cupboard.”
The PEN World Voices festival opened on Monday in New York with a lineup of short, politically focused talks by Noam Chomsky, the Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Judith Butler, among others. This evening at 7 p.m., Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio will be speaking on a PEN panel at the New School about war writing, along with Phil Klay, Nadifa Mohamed, Roxana Robinson, and Joanna Scutts. Our next issue, as it happens, takes a special look at war.
Salon has hired Jim Newell to blog about politics full-time for the site. We look forward to seeing more Newell, whose most recent piece for Bookforum was about Malcolm Gladwell and Amy Chua: “What gap in the rubble-strewn culture of the American meritocracy is the Gladwell franchise filling? For starters, his appeal seems to be existential. In much the same way that he defends his slipshod intellectual method as mere storytelling, with a self-evident and universal allure, he tells readers that their stories matter.”
Here’s the trailer for a documentary about the late internet activist Aaron Schwartz.
The Onion offers a sneak preview of Clickhole.com, a new site that will take on the eminently take-onable Buzzfeed and Upworthy. The New York Business Journal gives the details.
