Jump to navigation Skip to content
Barnes & Noble will shutter Fictionwise.com and its affiliated e-book sites on December 4; thieves took a portable writing desk used by Middlemarch author George Eliot from the Nuneaton Museum in England; Dwell created a map of independent bookstores across America; and other news.
Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, as well as Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, passed away yesterday in their respective countries; novelist Paul Auster has engaged in a war of words with Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey; Open Letters Monthly examines the hidden life of Virginia Woolf's institutionalized half-sister, Laura Makepeace Stephen; and other news.
Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms.
Among the many poetry collections that have been published in the weeks leading up to National Poetry Month, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, a collaborative book of sestinas by James Cummins and David Lehman released by Soft Skull Press in February, features perhaps the most prestigious and, simultaneously, zany cast of characters to appear in a book of poems since Alan Kaufman's Outlaw Bible of American Poetry was published by Thunder's Mouth Press seven years ago.
