Posts by author
Dinah Fay
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A Fair Shake for Flawed Female Characters
Over at the Guardian, Emma Jane Unsworth considers the apparent likeability divide between anti-heroes—as it turns out, a heavily gendered archetype—and their female counterparts. Why does it seem that readers have a more negative reaction to women behaving badly and…
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Who Will Stand Up for Crumbling Libraries?
In an opinion piece in the New York Daily News, David Giles calls upon the de Blasio administration to extend its efforts to strengthen infrastructure and promote equal opportunity by aggressively funding some of the NYC’s most valuable public spaces:…
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Sci-Fi Tide Sweeps through China
Science fiction is a growing force on the Chinese literary landscape now that government scrutiny of the genre has loosened up, according to a recent article in the Times. The English publication of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, following…
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Poets of Color and the Avant-Garde
In a provocative piece for the latest issue of Lana Turner, Cathy Park Hong takes the self-appointed avant-garde movement to task for its all-too-traditional track record on race and identity politics. Park Hong writes: The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is…
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Streaming the Book Fair, Olympic-Style
According to a report in the New York Times, PBS will be live-streaming the Miami Book Fair at Dade College later this month. Representatives at PBS cite a strong correlation between public television watchers and book consumers, and will be…
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LA Star Map: Graveyard Edition
Readers who visit Paris or London in the hopes of paying their respects to departed authors can do so in one fell swoop, with graves concentrated in a single, central location; visitors to LA, however, will have to do some…
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It’s Fair Use, My Dear Watson
There’s been no shortage of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs in the past few years, and with the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a case from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, contemporary re-imaginings of the detective savant will continue to thrive. The…
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Russian Novels for Rushing Muscovites
In addition to boasting one of the most beautiful subway systems in the world, Moscow commuters now stand to become the best-read. Per the Guardian, over 100 titles from authors including Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are now available for download,…
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Reading Recs: Man vs. Machine
At Co.EXIST, Jessica Leber pits the algorithms of digital giants Amazon and Goodreads against the ultimate recommendation engine: librarians. Leber details her experience with the Brooklyn Public Library’s BookMatch program, in which real librarians respond to patron’s requests for reading…
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Is Word Perfect?
Writing for the NYR Blog, Edward Mendelson gets deep into philosophy to address a true writer’s question: Is Microsoft Word the best tool for composing text? Borrowing ideas from Plato, Auden, and the programming concept of a “kludge,” Mendelson teases…
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Summer Camp for Book Nerds
For the burgeoning field of Critical Bibliography, “the study of the physical characteristics of books and the process of bookmaking,” Rare Book School is the highlight of the year. The Paris Review’s Benjamin Breen reports from the annual conference out…
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Surveillance in the Stacks
Librarians have hard-won reputations as defenders of open information and patron privacy, but what about third-party providers of library services? Slate’s Future Tense explores some recent revelations from companies like Adobe, whose Digital Editions e-book software has been criticized for…