The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
"He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum." Random House Kids is coming out with a collection of forgotten Dr. Seuss stories that were published in midcentury magazines. Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories will be released in September. Random House describes the book: "This follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories features familiar Seussian faces and places — including Horton the Elephant, Marco, Mulberry Street, and a Grinch — as well as an introduction by renowned Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen. Seuss fans will learn more about Horton's integrity, Marco's amazing imagination, a narrowly avoided disaster on Mullbery Street, and a devious Grinch."
HarperCollins says it will cut parts of a book that caused former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura to sue the estate of late author Chris Kyle for defamation. Kyle's book American Sniper alleges that Kyle punched Ventura after the former governor and pro-wrestler commented that the Navy SEALs "deserve to lose a few" in Iraq. On Tuesday, a jury awarded Ventura almost $2 million.
For The New York Review of Books, Hilton Als writes about Flannery O'Connor's "gorgeous soul sickness — her various judgments and hurts and desire to know and love her ever-mysterious Lord in what appeared to be a God-forsaken world."
The poet and critic Stephen Burt is interviewed in The Adroit Journal: "Poetry for me is its own end, its own aim — but individual poems can also, as horses take riders, have other aims too. You can write a poem to redefine romantic love, or attack (or even advocate!) imperialism, or undermine the tradition of all-too-simple protest poems, or classify types of upstate New York snow."
"I glanced furtively around to check that no one was watching and prepared to scale the wall." — Douglas Field on breaking into James Baldwin's house.
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