Phillips wins University City literary award
Carl Phillips, a professor of English in Arts & Sciences, will receive the 2023 Tradition of Literary Excellence Award from the University City Municipal Commission on Arts & Letters.
Horror story: How WashU restored Poe’s spine-tingling text
To University Libraries’ Cassie Brand, few texts are as spooky as “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe. In celebration of Halloween, Brand shares how University Libraries saved its rare first edition of the Poe classic.
Cooperman, Griswold receive notable mentions in ‘Best American Essays 2023’
Jeannette Cooperman and John Griswold, both staff writers for The Common Reader, the journal of essays and ideas housed at Washington University, have been named to the Notable Essays list in “Best American Essays 2023.”
‘Object Lessons’ book series comes to WashU
“Object Lessons,” the long-running series of pocket-sized books that explores the secret lives of ordinary things, is now based in the Program in Public Scholarship in Arts & Sciences.
The Leniad
Nathaniel Rosenthalis’ The Leniad is a mesmerizing, romantic, and surreal collection of poems. Rosenthalis writes with the care of the maker of the universe, turning everything over from the world’s tallest mountains to the smallest pebble on the beach, always landing on the exact word. Rosenthalis is a poet who “hears the highway is blue in a blur” and listens.
The Fragile Threads of Power
Threads of Power (Volume 1)
Once there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London.
After a desperate attempt to prevent corruption and ruin in the four Londons, there are only three—Grey London, thriving but barely able to remember its magical heritage; Red London, ruled lately by the Maresh family, flourishing and powerful; and White London, left to brutality and decay.
Now the worlds are going to collide anew—brought to a dangerous precipice by the discoveries of three remarkable magicians.
Rescuing adventure
Shopping. Driving. Parenting. Eating out. Working out. Today, sources of adventure are as limitless as a marketer’s imagination. No activity is too mundane, no product too crass, no invocation too preposterous. In Adventure: An Argument for Limits, Christopher Schaberg grapples with classical conceptions of adventure, their 21st-century simulacra, and the earnest question: What constitutes adventure today?
‘The distribution of ideas’
Publishing is both a centuries-old intellectual tradition and a sprawling contemporary practice. Yet at its core, publishing seeks to answer one overarching question: How do ideas make their way into the world? So argues Martin Riker, director of the new publishing concentration in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.
A Film in Which I Play Everyone
Poems
“A Film in Which I Play Everyone” takes its title from a response David Bowie gave to a fan who asked if he had upcoming film roles. “I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized autobiography that I am writing,” Bowie answered. “Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.”
University Libraries awarded grant to preserve born-digital poetry collections
Washington University Libraries received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support an exploration of essential questions surrounding the acquisition, discoverability, preservation and use of born-digital poetry collections. The $250,000 award will enable the libraries to develop online resources and systems to process, preserve and steward the collections of a new generation of digital-native poets.
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