Treehouse

compiled by Rachel Bondurant

Coupla things I’m loving from The Millions for you to read and enjoy. Darryl Campbell dissects the book review. This is great because I feel like everyone is talking about book reviews these days. It’s also great because he does a fine job with his dissection and links to oodles of reviews and articles, positive and negative, good and bad. This article will keep you busy for hours. The next one is for all my people considering, pursuing, or coming out of an MFA. Hope Mills offers an alternative to teaching for folks with that notorious what-can-I-do-with-this-to-afford-food kind of anxiety an MFA may or may not produce. (I still want one.)

Next up are two lists from Flavorwire: “12 of the Most Beautiful Literary Magazines Online” and “10 Underrated Books Everyone Should Read.” The former does not include this magazine – inexplicably, I might add, as we are just as good-looking as, say, Fwriction: review – but it does include PANK, because there is no list about lit mags that doesn’t include PANK. (Is there?) The latter includes ten books I’ve not heard of – though a few authors are, thankfully, familiar – so this list is pretty accurate as far as I’m concerned.

Accurate the list may be, but the last thing I need is more books for my “Read More Books and Less Shit” list. For example, The New York Times has me adding up how many hours I need to work in order to afford all of the amazing books available or coming available this fall. Junot Diaz, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, J.K. Rowling – Who has this kind of time?? Also from a New York publication (and also relevant to my book-reading anxiety, as I’ve just started with Infinite Jest), D.T. Max pays brief tribute to DFW, the five-year anniversary of whose death was this past Wednesday, in The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog.