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Book News: Rankine, Glück On National Book Awards Longlist For Poetry

The poetry shortlist for the National Book Awards will be announced Oct. 15.
NationalBook.org
The poetry shortlist for the National Book Awards will be announced Oct. 15.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

  • The poetry longlist for the 2014 National Book Awards includes collections from Claudia Rankine, Fanny Howe, Edward Hirsch and former U.S. Poet Laureates Louise Glück and Mark Strand. The National Book Foundation said in a press release: "The Longlisted books range in style and content: from a single elegiac narrative poem to a provocative examination of race relations told in an experimental fusion of lyric, prose poems, and image." It is the second of four longlists being released this week — Young People's Literature was announced yesterday, and Nonfiction and Fiction will be announced Wednesday and Thursday. The shortlists will be announced in October and the winners on Nov. 19. The full poetry longlist is:
  • Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion

    Brian Blanchfield, A Several World

    Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

    Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

    Fanny Howe, Second Childhood

    Maureen N. McLane, This Blue

    Fred Moten, The Feel Trio

    Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

    Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus

    Mark Strand, Collected Poems

  • In an essay in The New Statesman,Booker-nominated author Will Self rails against hipster culture. But don't feel too bad, hipsters — he also dislikes George Orwell, grits, crowdfunding, artisanal potato chips ("death discs"), muzak, social media and Emma Watson. (He does, however, enjoy jam.)
  • Kevin Holden has a new poem, "Bees," in The New Yorker:
  • "Bees in Virgil — something silver and secret,

    Like lightning over the land

    Or striking a plum tree on some dried hill."

  • More than a dozen recently discovered letters by Jack Kerouac will be auctioned off in November. The Los Angeles Times' Carolyn Kellogg reports: "Typed and single-spaced, the letters often have a frenetic, breathless quality. Written by Kerouac as early as high school, they show, in part, the development of the writing style that would make him the most famous novelist of the Beat Generation."
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    Annalisa Quinn is a contributing writer, reporter, and literary critic for NPR. She created NPR's Book News column and covers literature and culture for NPR.