Now here’s an idea right in Utne Reader’s wheelhouse: “a non-profit project promoting independent publishers to public libraries all over the United States.” It’s known as Hey Small Press! Founded by Don Antenen, who works at a public library in Kentucky, and Kate Hensley, Hey Small Press! has a three-fold method:

One: we select and review ten new or upcoming titles per month. Two: we send our list to public librarians and encourage them to order the titles. Three: we also make available all our reviews to the public. Our goal is for readers across the country to walk into their public library every month with our list of small press books and encourage librarians to order them.

Despite all the stories about the changes happening or likely to happen to libraries, Kathleen Rooney over at Harrietwrites, “For the moment, brick-and-mortar libraries continue to exist, and are still great places to get actual printed-on-paper-and-bound books. So it might be of interest that…Hey Small Press! now exists too…with the aim of encouraging ‘libraries to acquire small and independent press books.’” 

There are still great books being published by small presses all over the world, but on top of the changing library landscape, independent bookstores have been closing all over the place and chain stores are less likely than ever to take chances on anything that’s not a sure bet. That means those small publishing houses need all the help they can get. It’s nice to know then that, as Rooney writes, “committed people are out there cultivating love for good books and working hard to get more of them on library shelves.”

(Related: “Library Haunting: A spirited defense of one of America’s last great public institutions” from the March-April issue of Utne Reader.)

Source: Harriet 

Image from Pundit Kitchen 

David Foster Wallace is a difficult genius. Starting with the publication of his debut novel The Broom of the System in 1987, the postmodern author’s dense, grandly-footnoted, ontological examinations of mundane subjects—cruise ships, high-school tennis, the IRS—have beguiled, daunted, and delighted readers. The Pale King, Wallace’s almost-finished novel chronicling the life of a tax auditor, was posthumously published (Wallace committed suicide in 2008) on April 15. In the weeks leading up to The Pale King’s publication, Wallace’s last work was met with both ebullient praise and sharp criticism.

Jonathan Franzen is probably Wallace’s most high-profile fanboy. Now that Franzen’s has some freedom from Freedom, he penned a piece for New Yorker about his travels to the remote Pacific Island of Masafuera to catch up on some Robinson Crusoe and mourn Wallace’s death. (Subscription required).

Authors David Lipsky (also Wallace’s biographer) and Rick Moody praised The Pale King on KCRW’s Bookworm. Moody reads the novel’s opening lines as well. You can listen to the podcast here.

If you want to dig deeper into Wallace’s personal life, consider joining up with his cultish fanclub, The Howling Fantods. Or, for that matter, you can follow the path of The Awl’s Maria Bustillos and visit the Wallace archives at University of Texas at Austin’s Ransom Center. Make what you will out of his obsession with self-help books.

As Kottke points out, even Wallace’s classics aren’t universally loved. A prankster posted the opening page of Wallace’s epic tome Infinite Jest on Yahoo! Answers under the subject line “First page of my book. what do you think?” Although the expertise of the commenters shouldn’t be forgotten, the experiment elicited some interesting responses. “Honestly, my first thought was, ‘There are so dang many HYPHENS!’ and I couldn’t concentrate until I didn’t see any more,” wrote one; “No discernible voice/tone in this writing. Rambling descriptions. I, frankly, do not care where each and every person is seated. I don’t care what shoe you’re wearing. If you take out all the unnecessary details, you’d be left with about seven words,” wrote another.

Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin is no fan of Wallace herself (“I expect my current obsession with Henry James is met with bafflement by quite a few who feel the same way about him”) points to a sharp piece of criticism from Prospect’s Geoff Dyer, who suffers from a severe literary allergy. “I liked the idea of someone swimming in big modernist and postmodern theory and still making room for human feeling,” writes Dyer, “but a page—sometimes even a sentence, or an essay title—brings me out in hives.”

Sources: Bookslut, Bookworm, Kottke, New Yorker (subscription required), Prospect, The Awl 

Jolie Holland doesn’t see the need for poetry. Well, she doesn’t see the need for reading poetry.

Writing of her early creative life, Holland says she was inspired by Dylan Thomas, William Blake, and William Butler Yeats. Somewhere along the way, though, Holland stopped consuming poetry on the page and instead started letting it come to her “through her ears.”  

In the January 2011 issue of Poetrythe songwriter writes, “Just as dinosaurs didn’t really disappear but became birds, poems have become songs.”

I don’t know how to talk about what poetry is, except to talk about the experience. It’s good to have your hand on the rudder, and know when the current is moving powerfully. One thing I’ve enjoyed noticing is that both classical Zen haiku and my favorite American music have at least one little trick in common. I’d describe the way that classic Zen haiku works in this way: The poet describes the world, and describes his own mind, in one deft and beautiful stroke. It’s like a report of what’s in front of and behind the eyes.

Holland sees no distinction between the poetry she loves and the music she listens to: Morrissey and The Smiths introduced her to the work of Oscar Wilde, and she keeps Emily Dickinson’s description of poetry in mind when she’s writing songs. “I remember Emily Dickinson’s very useful definition of poetry: that which makes one feel as though the top of one’s head has been taken off…That same sort of physical cue is exactly the kind of meter I check when I’m deciding about music.”

It may be cliché to claim songs are poems, but in this short essay for Poetry, Holland makes the claim convincingly.

Source: Poetry 

Image by Glutnix, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Hey you gloomy skateboarding adolescent, are you feelin’ down? Maybe you should turn off the Joy Division album and pick up some Emily Dickinson. The chances of being a happy, well-adjusted teenager, reports The Independent, are much greater if you keep your nose in the crease of a book. The Independent summarized the findings of a new study by Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine:

Announced April 4, the US study compared six types of media—television and movies, music, video games, internet, magazines and newspapers, and books—and reported that the music-loving teens were 8.3 times more likely to be depressed that teens who spent the most time using the other types of media. The book lovers, on the other hand, were far less likely to be depressed than all the other groups, researchers said.

Just be careful with Edgar Allen Poe and the like.

Source: The Independent 

Image by ckaroli, licensed under Creative Commons.