1. The Art of the Strange Writing Exercise
From The Millions: We need to shake things up in the creative writing classroom. We need to remember that writing is a messy, fractured, intensely personal pursuit that must not be neutered by the institutional needs of our classrooms. One solution is to embrace the strange; one method is to imbue the strange into writing exercises.
2. The Case of the Disappearing Black Detective Novel
From New Republic: Hughes Allison was a black mystery writer with promising future. What went wrong?
3. An Urban History: The Influence of Street Gangs on Contemporary Art by Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre
From The Los Angeles Review of Books: The influence of street gang culture on art in Los Angeles has been systematically underrepresented by academia and art history. Although scholarly research has traced the origin of gang graffiti from the 1930s on, this aesthetic has been largely absent from the dialogue about the shaping of modern art.
4. Online “Best of 2015″ Book Lists
From Largehearted Boy: For the eight straight year, I am aggregating every online year-end book list I find. As the lists appear online, I will add them to the master list.
From Full Stop: Critics have put forth a few names, but so far there is no Next Bolaño yet. Not in terms of global readership or consensus, at least. So how are anglophone readers to know what Latin American literature commands our attention?
6. Queen Victoria’s Teenage Diaries (1912)
From Public Domain Review: Excerpts from the teenage diaries of Queen Victoria, spanning from 1832, when Victoria was 13 years old, to 1840, the same year that she married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha at the age of 20.