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From Stephen Elliott
Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because we have to,” because they’re part of the established literary canon.
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I was walking around Washington, D.C., my hometown and the city where I lived for 34 years, while reading Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. I imagined all the selves I had been while walking on a few blocks full of my own, my family’s and my country’s history.
Literary blondes have always held a totemic power….Sex, politics, and power: fictional blondes had it all.
For the Toast, Stassa Edwards looks back at centuries of literature and culture—Petrarch’s Laura, Middlemarch‘s Rosamond Vincy, Taylor Swift—to parse the semiotics of blondness.
...moreRumpus contributor extraordinaire Jason Novak shares an ambitious illustration of George Eliot’s Middlemarch over at the Paris Review Daily.
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”