Life on the literary Interwebs has been a little more upbeat this week.
I'll put the funnest thing first, and this will have you so distracted you'll probably never get past it. The staff of the LA Times' books blog created an interactive board game about becoming a writer. Say goodbye to your weekend.
Our new Poet Laureate, Juan Filipe Herrera, started his tenure this week and launched his major project, La Casa De Colores, a Web platform through which he'll curate a massive epic poem called "La Familia," written by his fellow Americans. Here's a little writeup on how to submit.
This Sunday is the Brooklyn Book Festival, where you can sample the wares of dozens of small presses and magazines, plus see tons of writers reading and other literary events. Here's all the info.
And the controversies we've been following for weeks continue. After last week's blowup over the poet whose poem in this year's volume of the Best American Poetry was submitted under a false Chinese name (which turned out to actually belong to someone who attended the poet's high school), critic Stephen Burt decided to pay attention to the other 74 poems in the book in this review. Meanwhile, the Asian American Writers Workshop curated an online forum about the broader implications of the whole scandal.
