Yxta Maya Murray interviews Sandra Cisneros about her new book of poetry, Woman Without Shame, which is out now. After a wide-ranging conversation on poetry, her family, and her many awards, Murray asks Cisneros what her most significant relationship was. The poet mentions her dog, Camacho: “He loved me like no human being has ever loved me. Sometimes the great love of your life has four feet and a tail.”
There is still time to get free tickets to Bookforum’s online event, “Sports Annotated,” a discussion of fandom, obsession, and loss with Miranda Popkey, Lindsay Zoladz, Ross Gay, and Thomas Beller. The panel is based on our special summer issue on sports and literature, and is an official Bookend event of the Brooklyn Book Festival.
At the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Ryan Ruby considers Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, “the perils of making ‘freedom of expression’ the core of your politics,” and the novelist’s treatment of history, which Ruby finds “guilty of borrowed gravitas.” “McEwan’s novel is not so much an epic as it is three novellas in a trench coat,” Ruby writes, later clarifying: “The trench coat is History.”
For the Yale Review, Charlie Tyson writes an essay on public shaming as punishment. Noting that online platforms are not public squares but private companies, Tyson observes, “Pile-ons increase engagement. Our fury pads the purses of tech capitalists.” You can read more of Tyson’s work in the latest issue of Bookforum, in which he reviews Darryl Pinckney’s new coming-of-age memoir.
Four unpublished short stories by Ernest Hemingway, along with photographs, correspondence, and other newly recovered ephemera, are now available to scholars at an archive of Penn State University. The materials remained uncatalogued for decades after being retrieved from a storeroom in Key West’s Sloppy Joe’s Bar by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway.
