I can see a braid in that place we see without eyes. The braid is made up of strands that are the writers of the 12th Annual Cork International Short Story Festival. The braid is enormous and endless. Pulsates with light. Terrifying if it wasn’t so beautiful. This braid can tease and caress and choke. Can hold down, raise up, and hurl any which way. It can sail through air, the jumprope, and bite deep, the whip. Braid can work its way inside you. Fill you up till you’re squirming, gulping, enraptured. Till you’ll never be the same. Braid is velvet. Is barbed wire. Is brave. Braid is a weave of mystery and genius.

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More signs of the future and more reflections on a past that will always endure, here is today’s flurry of words. Ikea prepares your new bookshelf. The Nation has a look at Eliot’s muse of unhappiness. Posthumously, Salinger’s rare “writings” fetch a penny or two. Project Gutenberg will have a lasting effect, but is that as obvious as you think? Finally, a call to save your favorite words!

Dark Sky is now a university-affiliated press! We’ve teamed up with the University of Houston-Victoria, whose publishing department is also home to Fiction Collective Two, American Book Review, Cuneiform Press, symplokē, and The Society for Critical Exchange.

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Occasionally, the most surprising (and rewarding) reviews arrive months after a book’s release. Take this review of Stephen Sturgeon’s TREES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, thoughtfully written by Lisa Katz and published in The Quarterly Conversation, it came out yesterday, September 6th, six months after Sturgeon’s book was released:

Sturgeon’s poetry is fueled by this tension between circumstantial accident and individual imagination. In the opening poem, “Confabulators,” the speaker asks, “What do you speak after penguins enter / the trembling bear-baiting ring?” In other words, how do we attempt to explain the accidental, the unexplainable, using language? The choice of penguins and a bear-baiting ring seems random, and “trembling” is a bizarre way to describe an inanimate object. But the answer is in the title: we confabulate. The title describes both those who talk informally and those who replace fact with fantasy in their memory. Thus we create a new reality through language whenever we speak or write.

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You might be able to skip all your obligations with a clean enough conscience, but to me those priorities are there for a reason.  And so, maybe that weight-lifting from my head is the reason I particularly enjoy today’s links, or maybe the layaway stock makes it easier to choose. No matter what, I’m pleased with today’s flurry.  First, like the ocean currents of the South Pacific, James Wood asks the New Atheists for a Melvillian approach.  In light of Naipul’s “thoughts,” Audrey Bilger examines the import of Jane Austen’s gender.  Instead of psychology for nabokovians, how about Nabokov for psychologists? Or is literature as a science all wrong?  Or is it?