Julien Green, who was born of American parents in Paris in 1900 and wrote prolifically in French, kept a journal for over sixty years. One recurring subject of this extraordinary record of a writer’s interior life is the reading of Scripture. Green was a deeply serious reader and while he did not have an extensive formal education—he attended the University of Virginia for three years—he read very widely in several languages and learned, as an adult, to read not merely New Testament Greek but Hebrew as well. A brief entry in his journal from March 16, 1960 demonstrates how easy it is even for such a reader to assimilate the Gospels to conceptions of history that belong to the reader’s time but not to the earliest centuries of Christianity. (more…)

Wednesday’s NY Times reports that Alice Munro will receive the MacDowell Medal in a ceremony on Aug. 13 at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. The medal is awarded annually to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. The MacDowell Colony is the oldest artists’ colony in the United States. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Georgia O’Keeffe, I. M. Pei, and Merce Cunningham.

Fans of Munro may be interested in the Summer issue of VQR (available July 1) which will feature a story by Munro from her new collection due this fall; appreciations of her by Michael Cunningham, Margaret Atwood, and Russell Banks, among others; and an essay on her work by Marcela Valdes. Our website will feature an interview of Munro by Lisa Dickler Awano that we hope to post in early June.

Jane Jacobs, one of the great intellectuals, activists, and urban theorists of the twentieth century, died yesterday in Toronto. Obituaries and commentary are at the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe & Mail, and Seattle Times. Jacobs contributed to the Spring 2004 issue of VQR with an essay on education: “Credentialing vs. Educating.” We’re happy to make it available for all to read.

Cristina Henríquez’s novella and collection of stories, Come Together, Fall Apart, is out. The book has been getting great advance press—including a rave in Texas Monthly and starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus Reviews. You can read a very nice profile of Henríquez at Delaware Online, or see her in person if you’re going to be in Texas next week. If you can’t make it to Texas, then check out her story “Drive” on the VQR website. You’ll see why we named her one of “Fiction’s New Luminaries.” Then get your keester to a bookstore to buy the book—or order it from Amazon or Powell’s.

One week ago Slashdot wrote about Fibonacci-based poetry, more as a joke than anything else. Reader Gregory K. noted that the month being both National Poetry Month and Math Awareness month, and proposed six-line, twenty-syllable poems with a pattern of 1/1/2/3/5/8. On his blog he wrote his first “Fib”:

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

Slashdotters produced dozens of Fibs, and the meme spread across the blogosphere within days. Today, the New York Times‘ Motoko Rich writes about the new form of poetry, reporting that about 1,000 have been written now.

Given that internet trends have historically consisted of things like Hamster Dance, “All Your Base” and Mahir (”I Kiss You!!!!!”), poetry seems like a big step forward.

I found it a over month late, but here’s a nice interview with David Lynn, editor of the Kenyon Review, by John Sledge, the Books columnist of the Mobile (AL) Register. (Brief registration may be required.) Sledge offers that he plans to interview Bret Lott of the Southern Review and George Core of the Sewanee Review in future columns. Nice to see a book editor give a little attention to the lit mag world.

Via Shelf Awareness, Inc. Magazine offers a lengthy look at the near-death and rebirth of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA.