This week’s Publisher’s Weekly turns a welcome spotlight on Jeff Clark, the designer responsible for some of the truly remarkable book covers that have appeared over the last few years, from Matthew Rohrer’s Rise Up (Wave Books) to Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Kenning Editions) to Jonathan Bate’s biography and selected poems of John Clare (FSG). Jeff’s work is everywhere these days; besides being design director for Flood Editions—which has not one but two books of poetry up for an NBCC award this year—he designs for Ahsahta Press, Wave Books, and Essay Press, among many others. He also designed every Chicago Review cover between the Ed Dorn special issue (50:2/3/4) and our latest issue (53:2/3).
This little tidbit, which comes on the very last page of the new NYRB, just about makes up for the truly cringe-inspiring article on blogs by Sarah Boxer (which includes an instruction for reading emoticons that actually begins, “Tilt your head to the left…”):
No one can be sure how widespread sabotage by munitions workers was, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, including a story I can contribute myself. A German bomb fell through the roof of my wife’s grandmother’s house in the East End of London in 1943 and lodged, unexploded, in her bedroom wardrobe. When the bomb disposal unit opened it up, they found a note inside. “Don’t worry, English,” it said, “we’re with you. Polish workers.”
It’s from Richard J. Evans’s response to a letter by John Diebold.
One of the highlights of this year’s Key West Literary Seminar was a talk by the preternaturally gifted Junot Díaz. I’m not sure how it will play as a podcast, but the KWLS has been good enough to make one available here.
(Of course, if you haven’t yet read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, that’s your first assignment. God knows I’m not the first to say it, but this is it, the real deal.)
Maybe you knew about this, but I didn’t:
The recordings, which range from the late 1930s to recent times, are especially strong in the areas of fiddle, banjo, harmonica, and dulcimer tunes; secular ballads and songs; gospel songs, and the unaccompanied lined-out and shape note singing styles. Included as well are such relative unknowns as the mouth bow with origins in Africa, Cherokee singing and dance music, Swiss-American singing and yodeling, Hungarian-American cymbalum playing, and the jug band sound from the early 1900s comprised of a loose rural-urban mix of blues, hillbilly, and jazz.
In many instances the repertoire and playing styles documented in these recordings date well back into the 1800s. Among the music’s readily detectable influences are musical expressions arising from slavery, minstrel stage music, Civil War military music, and the dance music of Britain, Ireland and, in some instances, France and Germany.
(via Silas House)