Link wars

Miriam Burstein discovers that China Mieville’s City and the City “constitutes a crash course in Foucault.”

Patrick Kurp, visiting his brother in Cleveland, has been reading his end-of-summer vacation through Tove Jansson’s Summer Book.

On his vacation, the Amateur Reader toured the Edgar Allan Poe National Historical Site. No sooner had he returned home than he returned to Balzac.

Jake Seliger offers some advice to the “very very beginning writer.” I do not believe that anyone can learn to write fiction from a guidebook, but if one is needed I would recommend R. V. Cassill’s slim and intelligent Writing Fiction (1963).

Michael Gilleland wonders, along with Logan Pearsall Smith, if one shouldn’t be reading Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski instead—the Polish poets one has never read a word of.

Perry Middlemiss rounds up the 2009 winners of the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards.

Litlove recalls that the English critic F. R. Leavis was a “living nightmare of hostility,” arguing with “dissenters and disciples alike. His aggression assumed titanic proportions but was often expended on the pettiest disputes,” she says. A man after my own heart. [Update: Link has been repaired. Many thanks to Dave Lull for catching the mistake.]

Neal Verma rifles Hannah Arendt’s papers at the Library of Congress. Most of her correspondents, he notes, adopted the tone of awe.

Daniel E. Pritchard reflects upon “the cardinal sin of teaching poetry”—telling a student that his interpretation is wrong. “Poetry for my students happens in a sacred grove where creativity runs naked and free and where no opinion is unworthy or fails to earn astonished praise,” he sighs.

Darby M. Dixon III reports the early news about Richard Powers’s forthcoming novel Generosity. “[I]t’s a book that’s got me all jazzed up and I think you just might a chance at enjoying it a little, yourself, too,” he says. I’ve preordered it from Amazon, Darby.