Arthur Tress, Child Buried in Sand, Coney Island,196o, black-and-white photograph. Via Gothamist.

• Charles Wright will be America’s next poet laureate. “I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do … But as soon as I find out, I’ll do it.”
• Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinchis the literary novel of the moment—but it is any good? Many, including our own Lorin Stein, respond with a resounding no. “A book like The Goldfinchdoesn’t undo any clichés—it deals in them … Nowadays, even The New York TimesBook Reviewis afraid to say when a popular book is crap.”
• “Every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for … A prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel … will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up.”
• A portfolio of Arthur Tress’s photographs, from the late sixties and seventies, of children at play in Coney Island: “Tress spoke with children about their dreams—often nightmares that involved falling, monsters, that buried alive scenario—and would then photograph them experiencing it in a safe, staged setting.”
• New! From the makers of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” it’s “Morrissey Has an Infection.”