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More Silverstein videos compiled over at Open Culture.

From Publishing Perspectives:

By the fall, Nic says, the 4th Floor Chapbook Series Vending machine will be elevatored to the top floor of the Science Leadership Academy and open for business. It will offer young adult fiction and poetry from writers all across the country (submissions are still being accepted; more on that here) as well as work from the Science Leadership Academy’s own students. It may be the start of a new trend, or just something organically cool.

Very cool.

From the Guardian:

A poem written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams, in which the Hitchhiker's Guide author manages to successfully pull off rhyming "futile" with "mute, while", and "exhausted" with "of course did", has been discovered in a cupboard at his old school.

The entire poem is there, so click on through.

I laughed out loud while I was reading it, and then, when it was over, I wanted to cry that we lost him so young.

• mental_floss: 11 Movies Based on Poems.
• This one's for Josh: J.P. Donleavy is Still Standing.
• At Publishing Perspectives: How to Buy a Top Spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Um, ew.
• At Open Culture, The Hobbit, as imagined by Maurice Sendak:

Ursula K. Le Guin, as always, is The Stuff.

From her interview at The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Might that be why your fiction has been more readily admired in so-called literary circles—that it’s more engaged with human complexity and psychology?

LE GUIN

It’s helped to make my stuff more accessible to people who don’t, as they say, read science fiction. But the prejudice against genre has been so strong until recently. It’s all changing now, which is wonderful. For most of my career, getting that label—sci-fi—slapped on you was, critically, a kiss of death. It meant you got reviewed in a little box with some cute title about Martians—or tentacles.

Also, this killed me: "My father knew Alfred Knopf personally. I’d had recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf when I was seventeen. Blanche—she was a real grande dame, oh God, she was scary. And I’d go in with my little tooter." Like, can you even PICTURE THAT? I can't.

And then later she compares genre fiction to poetry—because in both cases, you're writing within a form—and a response to that "I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real" statement and holy crow, I just want to QUOTE EVERYTHING.

So, yeah. It's an AWESOME interview, not to be missed.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Aydlett resident Elissa Cooper asked to have "A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl" removed from the Currituck County High School library after her freshman daughter brought it home to read last February.

"My chances may not be very good, but I believe it is a worthwhile argument," Cooper said by phone Friday. "I'm prepared, and I know 100 percent it is wrong."

I loved that book. And I totally predicted that it would not go over well with some parents.

Woo, me.

I love these so much, I can't even:

Click on through to Tweetspeak for a whole bunch more (including Poe and Rumi and Eliot and Teasdale -- I guess I'll have to make my own Stein and Millay!), and a big infographic and all sorts of other good stuff.

Sonya Sones' What My Mother Doesn't Know is a measly 99¢ today!

So, if you haven't read it*, you should take advantage of that.

It's one I wish I could read again for the first time.

_____________________________

*FOR REALS? How have you not read it?

I give you... the first Much Ado About Nothing trailer:

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Google Poetics.

Terry Farish's The Good Braider is $1.99 today.

(And, I just noticed, is part of the Prime Lending Library.)

I bombed it: 6/14.

How embarrassing.

You?

From The Good Braider:

My mother calls me by two names, Viola, for Jesus,
and Keji, for firstborn girl.
"All men in Sudan will want to marry you," she used to say.
"You are a girl from Juba."

After suffering through—and surviving—years of war in Sudan, the family faces one danger too many, and Viola's mother makes a huge decision: to attempt the journey to the United States. And so that's what they do. 

Which makes it sound quick and easy. 

It's not. It's a long journey from Juba, Sudan, to Cairo, Egypt, and once in Egypt, they have to eke out an existence while hoping, every single day, that it will be the day when they get the blue cards that make them eligible for resettlement.

They wait over a year.

Once they're in the United States—in Portland, Maine!—while life is significantly less immediately dangerous, Viola's journey continues as she struggles to reconcile two very different cultures, to integrate into (and excel in) public school, as well as deal with the emotional repercussions of her entire journey.

First of all: I LOVE THIS COVER. It's just so pretty. Not just because of those gorgeous braids (I typed 'brains', like, four times just now), but because of the swoop of the model's neck, and because of the wide blue sky. It's clean and clear and makes nice of negative space, as befits the cover of a verse novel. Wow, I sound like a mega-dork. But it's true, so I'll leave it in.

As I just said, The Good Braider is a verse novel. Like many verse novels—AND OH MY GOD, PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M (MORE OF) AN IDIOT OR WHATEVER FOR SAYING THIS—it reads more like extremely spare prose with lots of line breaks than it does, you know, poetry. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. (Or is free verse just supposed to read like that? You'd think that with my background—I was all over the poetry classes in college—that I'd know that, but maybe too much Hart of Dixie* truly has made my brain smaller. Do I just not GET IT? Possibly. Anyway.)

It's got a fantastic sense of place and Farish conveys long periods of time spent waiting without ever slowing the pace of the story, both of which are quite impressive considering how few words she uses. The contrast between cultures is striking, and it's especially nice that the book portrays Viola attempting to understand and fit into American (and even more specifically, Maine**) culture, but never uses the somewhat-tired "I renounce my former culture/this new culture is so horrible and wrong; oh wait, now I'm proud to be a part of both cultures" storyline. She's drawn towards both worlds, but she just... keeps on keeping on, and eventually finds her place in both. That isn't to minimize what she experiences AT ALL. It's just that, especially in comparison with, say, the heroine in the last book I wrote about, she comes off as pretty damn even-keeled.

Oddly enough, it's not a book that I emotionally connected with***, though the story has stuck with me. As I read, it was clear to me that the author had, at the very least done some serious research, a vague feeling that was supported when I read the Acknowledgements: in which she thanks specific people from the Sudanese community of Portland. Because, despite my lack of emotional resonance, it was a book that felt true.

TRIGGER WARNING/SPOILER: Viola personally endures some particularly ugly (sexual) brutality before she leaves Sudan, and while much of it takes place off-screen, it's still... ag. Personally, I found the passages about her emotionally processing/coming to terms with that part of her history much more painful than reading about the actual assault/s, but the experience will be different for different readers.

_______________________________

*GARY COLE JUST SHOWED UP. GARY FREAKING COLE. I love him.

**She hits much of it dead-on. I may have squealed at the mention of Barber Foods.

***Though it's very possible that I held myself back—I have a tendency to do that with war stories, purely out of self-preservation.

_______________________________

Author page.

_______________________________

Amazon.

_______________________________

Book source: ILLed through my library. This book was read for the 2012 Cybils season.

If you've never heard it performed, click on through for a treat.

(via reddit)

From the Guardian:

Inspired by one of the English language's seminal works, 24 modern-day pilgrims – including two from China and one from Bermuda – braved piercing April 'shoures' to undertake a full-scale re-enactment Chaucer's masterpiece, acting out the tales as they travelled on foot to Canterbury in aid of the National Literacy Trust.

Click on through for audio and photos!

Tomorrow, I'll have to swing by the post office and pick up this set.

At EW:

...Dante's Divine Comedy to be removed from classrooms.

Arg.

• A Diana Wynne Jones-inspired shawl pattern. (via CC)
• Largehearted Boy is, as usual, aggregating all of this year's Best Books lists.
• Spotiseek is, like, Pandora for Spotify. Loving it.
• I need to remember to show this to Josh.
• Lauren McLaughlin, Scott Westerfeld, David Levithan and Robin Wasserman are hosting a group chat at Figment tomorrow night.
• Two shortlisted poets have pulled out of the TS Eliot prize, as they're uncomfortable with the sponsor, which is an investment management firm.
• The 2011 Bad Sex Award has gone to David Guterson, for the shower scene in Ed King, his re-write of Oedipus Rex.
• Veronica Roth's Divergent has won both Best YA SF/F of 2011 and Favorite Book of 2011 in this year's Goodreads Awards. In less pleasant news, Gwyneth Paltrow's My Father's Daughter won Best Cookbook. 

You know, the one where she bakes the gingerbread?

I love that book.

Anyway for those of you who haven't read it, Emily liked to bake.

It's freaking Hamlet.

No, even though the book has illustrations, it's probably not a great choice for your three-year-old's bedtime story.

Jeez.

This is an issue?

Goodness.

I'm so crabby.

(via mental_floss)

...but this sounds awesome.

...over at Indexed.

Heh heh heh.

(via Becky)