Twenty previously unknown poems by Pablo Neruda have been found among his papers. The poems were discovered in a box of manuscripts at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Santiago, Chile; the earliest dates from the mid-1950s. At El Pais, read an excerpt in Spanish.
At the Paris Review Daily, the poet Rowen Ricardo Phillips is blogging the World Cup.
First editions of Haruki Murakami’s new novel will come with a sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators, the Guardian reports, shaking its head over the increasingly frantic publicity efforts of publishers.
Penguin Books published an astonishing 125,000 copies of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, a debut novel by the French writer Joël Dicker who is in France exceedingly famous and in the United States not so much. Since May, only thirteen thousand copies have sold, in spite of the book, which is set in the US, seeming “almost cynically designed to be popular in the United States,” as Alice Gregory writes at the New Yorker blog, “a thriller for people who don’t think of themselves as people who read thrillers.” But the book is “wooden” and formulaic. Perhaps it “did well in France because the French . . . are too French for themselves.”
The governor of South Carolina will not veto a measure that penalizes two universities for assigning books with gay themes, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. “The College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina-Upstate will have to spend $52,000 and $17,000, respectively, to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents, ‘including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.’” The punishment was a response to the colleges assigning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel and Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, edited by Candace Chellew-Hodge and Ed Madden.
