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Join NOW!Friendly emails are a sign of progress, not weakness, in our working lives. Policing women’s use of language is over (we wish). But at the Huffington Post, Angelina Chapin argues that women’s use of exclamation marks in the workplace represents a subversion of masculinist notions about leadership.
...moreThere’s something very unsettling about the idea of editing someone’s personal and autobiographical journal. After all, it’s supposed to be a portal into the past: Anne’s experience in the annex, exactly what happened exactly as it happened. At The Establishment, Stephanie Watson makes the case for buying only the unabridged version of Anne Frank’s Diary—the version […]
...moreAt The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also realized that I never noticed how transgressive the story is. The mother’s liturgy about behaving […]
...moreLois Lowry takes to the New York Times with her story of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at age sixteen, and how her perspective on its portrayal of children and violence has (and hasn’t) changed in the book’s six decades since publication: Today’s young readers, inundated as they have been recently […]
...moreTo an English-speaker, the difference between “autobiography” and “memoir” seems intuitive. But in German, there’s no equivalent of the word “memoir.” At Lit Hub, Tara Bray Smith muses on the distinction between the two genres, and what it tells us about German literature and history.
...moreAt Electric Literature, Dani Spencer looks at Japanese writers who have already written dozens of books that envision what the world could look like if Donald Trump were to win the election. Let’s hope that’s the closest we have to get to finding out. Meanwhile, on a lighter note, Twitter imagines how the known non-reader […]
...moreOver at Lit Hub, Bridget Read discusses the gender politics of Tinder, the rise of the Single Woman, and how these phenomena have permeated recent nonfiction by women: It makes sense that independence would be their chosen frontier, the pursuit of solitude their manifest destiny. The ability to be alone has long been the provenance […]
...moreBob Dylan? At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel acknowledged that no one is quite sure how to feel about the news. At Slate, Stephen Metcalf praises Bob Dylan’s genius, but argues that he’s a musician, not a poet: The objection here hinges in the definition of the word literature. You wouldn’t give the literary prize to […]
...moreWhile the outing of Elena Ferrante and the robbing of Kim Kardashian were not inherently gendered acts, the responses to them certainly have been. In light of these two seemingly divergent issues, the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino meditates on the framing of female ambition in the media, and what happens “when women signify too much”: …the […]
...moreAt Lit Hub, Lina Mounzer discusses the Syrian women bearing witness to the war through writing, her own complicated relationship with the English language, and translation as a symbolic act: [War] reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language. A barrel will no longer ever be a barrel again; shrapnel will always explode from […]
...moreDon’t miss this interview at The Believer between former Rumpus Managing Editor Zoë Ruiz and contributor Micah Perks on Perks’s new novel, What Becomes Us—a story told from the point of view of twin fetuses inside the main character. Topics discussed include the book’s themes of “nice girls,” hunger, and the desire to feed oneself, as well as the publishing process.
...moreAt The Establishment, Laura Beans discusses the importance of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a predictive novel, drawing many connections between the novel and increasing attempts to control women’s bodies: Instead of seeming further from the truth, the novel’s warnings only seem to echo louder in recent years. Atwood’s analysis of her own twisted […]
...more‘Banned books’ sounds like a thing of the past. But over at Lit Hub, Amy Brady details the ways that the fight against censorship continues in libraries and schools today: If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and […]
...moreSettling the debate about whether “writer” is job that arose with Merritt Tierce’s Marie Claire essay about going broke post-debut novel, and a response piece by Ester Bloom at The Billfold calling writing a hobby, Lincoln Michel finds a middle ground between the two stances, arguing at Electric Literature that yes, writing should be considered a job—and the […]
...moreAt The Establishment, Anne Theriault recounts driving out West to see the house of her childhood heroine Laura Ingalls, and what it taught her about the horrific underpinnings of the American Dream: And then we passed a mural with a confederate flag and I felt that hot prickle of shame and fear—fear because of what […]
...moreHere is the thing: silence does not protect us; in fact it suffocates us. Marcia Chatelain, professor, author, and originator of #thefergusonsyllabus, discusses the importance of talking about race in high school and college classrooms in Lenny Letter.
...moreFollowing a viral Twitter interaction about whether the dictionary is adapting too much to new trends in language, Merriam-Webster reassures everyone that language changes over time, and that’s okay.
...moreAt Lit Hub, Ilana Masad outlines the importance of publicists in generating buzz for new books in a social media saturated-environment, and the struggle many authors face to generate their own publicity at small presses without the resources to do more: The difference between being published with a “Big 5” publisher versus a small or independent […]
...moreAt The Establishment, Laura Bogart writes a heartwarming ode to her the special type of love that exists only between human and canine—the kind of love she says she’s always been searching for: Together, we built a life from endless repetitions of “sit, stay, come, good”; from my coaching her into a calmer, more confident […]
...moreI never heard editors talk about how disturbed and insecure writers might become as a result of relentless rejection, living every day with what James Salter called “the feeling of injustice.” It was more fun for editors to characterize their jobs as overseeing petting zoos full of needy misfits and narcissists, a point of view […]
...moreSworn haters of the word ‘moist,’ now is your chance to be heard. Oxford Dictionaries has launched a worldwide vote to find English language speakers’ least favorite word, the Guardian’s Alison Flood reported. Other top contenders include “no,” “like,” and “phlegm.”
...moreThe power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our identities. At The Establishment, Jené Gutierrez recounts an argument with her editors over using the correct rendering of bell hooks’s name, and how language has historically functioned as a site of white privilege and domination.
...moreAt the Guardian, Charlotte Jones takes issue with the recently announced Pride and Prejudice sequel fleshing out the life of Mary Bennett—a character whose neglect is central to Austin’s plot: The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason she so often features in lists of our favourite literary characters – relies solely upon […]
...moreWe’ve all lent a book to someone and never gotten it back—and most of us have probably been on the other end of that exchange as well. For Read It Forward, Jonathan Russell Clark writes a manifesto against the somewhat sacred practice of book lending and borrowing (and no, he doesn’t like libraries either).
...moreIn a powerful essay at The Establishment, Evelyn Deshane discusses rejecting the medical narrative around transitioning, and how tattoos allowed them to reclaim their own body: When the physicality of my gender—that “place” that could be home—feels out of reach, tattoos are my way to be present in my body, and to control what happens to […]
...moreLess than two percent of science fiction stories published in 2015 were by black writers. And a recent study found that black speculative fiction writers face “universal” racism—more damning evidence demonstrating the institutionalized racism in book publishing, and the importance of introducing more diversity at every level of the process.
...moreBarriers for entering journalism are only increasing; according to a report, journalism has “a greater degree of social exclusivity than any other profession”. The Guardian’s Harrison Jones argues that if newsrooms do not attempt to invest in remedying this issue, the future of journalism is in peril.
...moreMore and more people are leaving the salaried workplace for the freelance economy. But it’s not necessarily by choice; at Bitch Magazine, Sarah Grey discusses how companies and labor policy push women in particular toward freelancing, and why the “lean in” brand of workplace feminism is unhelpful in remedying it.
...moreAt The Establishment, Mariah Ramsawakh discusses the damaging, unrealistic “miraculous cure” trope often found when the media portrays characters with disabilities: People with disabilities are tired of being lumped together as less than able-bodied folk, and being told they’ll only be the “real” versions of themselves when they’ve been cured. When I asked my three disabled participants […]
...moreA German airline has teamed up with the German book trade for a campaign called Buch an Bord (Book on Board) that allows each passenger to travel with an extra kg of weight just for books. Hear that, American airlines?
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