Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me

There are so many quotable bits from this book, one of the most buzzed about in recent months:

"All our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, event white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth...the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions, all land, with great violence, upon the body."

Excerpted in this month's Atlantic.

Writers wanted, Isaab Babel's new translation, Roxane Gay talks to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pico Iyer on Las Vegas and Pyongyang: Cultural Digest, Monday August 17

• Writers wanted: where writers are finding agents and where writers are getting published.
• Excellent article on the "Brutal Lyricism of Isaac Babel." A new translation of the 1926 Red Cavalry. "Describing the absurdities and calamities of war, Babel undermines any version of Russian history that would have us think unswervingly nobel."
• Part of their interesting talks series, Barnes and Noble hosts a conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay.
• Pico Iyer sets his razor-sharp intelligence on considering the differences and similarities between Las Vegas and Pyongyang, both being cities of "a mid-20th century spirit that saw what power and profit could be found in constructing mass fantasies..."

Montreal art mural, Iris Murdoch loved Titian, Ta-Nehisi Coates & James Baldwin, Historical Montreal walking tours and literary road maps: Cultural Digest, August 3

Iris Murdoch: Titian #fangirl

• Salon explains why all the recent buzz around the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates would have been impossible without the work of his predecessor and literary ancestor, James Baldwin.
• French Mural artist creates a stir with his fascinating Montreal street mural.
• Heritage Montreal announces new walking tours of various historical neihghborhoods of the city including Griffintown, St-Henri, and the Plateau, among others. Tours take place on Saturdays and Sundays from August 1 until late September and last two hours. Register here.
• Iris Murdoch talks about her favorite painting, Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas in this 1990 Paris Review interview.
• Youtube makes available this four-part documentary on the life and death of Caravaggio, hosted by Andrew Graham-Dixon, author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane.
• The Guardian reports on Atlas Obscura and their US literary map which maps in space scenes from the work and the lives of many American writers including Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and (one my favorite writers), William Least Heat-Moon and his book Blue Highways.