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Join NOW!I thought, why not write the book that really scares you? At the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler talks with Colson Whitehead about his new book, The Underground Railroad, which features the underground railroad literalized as a railroad, underground.
...moreNot only are these characters destined to die in the cautionary tales and to endure marriages to self-congratulatory men in the redemptions tales, they don’t even have anyone to miss them when they succumb to these fates At Hazlitt, Alana Massey writes about the baseless trope in films of the depraved and friendless female sex […]
...moreAt Lit Hub, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares an excerpt of her new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, exploring the cultural understandings and depictions of female genitalia from Shakespeare’s “No thing” to Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, and how those understandings are influenced by culture and vice versa.
...moreOver at the New Yorker, Lydia Kiesling writes about workplace fiction, typically seen as a male-centric dominion overseen by writers like Kafka, as written by women from Helen Phillips in The Beautiful Bureaucrat to Terry McMillan in How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
...moreUltimately what is more real and desirable is showing savage, ambitious women rising from the ashes of a sexist society and becoming whole, instead of acting like dudes. For Tabú, Antonia Crane writes about UnREAL, a Lifetime drama highlighting destructive, demeaning, and terrible working conditions for women, and how it subverts the male gaze by […]
...moreIf you want to change the world, why write poetry? Wayne Koestenbaum, writing for the New York Times, takes a moment to appreciate Adrienne Rich’s body of work via the recently released Collected Poems, focusing on Rich’s ability to sing impassioned with ethical concerns.
...moreThe response to [the Handmaid’s Tale] was interesting. The English, who had already had their religious civil war, said, “Jolly good yarn.” The Canadians in their nervous way, said, “Could it happen here?” And the Americans said, “How long have we got?” For Lit Hub, Grant Munroe interviews Margaret Atwood on seemingly everything, touching on the […]
...moreA novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never. Over at VICE, Lincoln Michel nabbed the elusive and brilliant Joy Williams for an interview about her newest short story collection, ninety-nine stories of God. Her answers are wonderful in their minimalist nature, and for lovers of lists she even included “8 Essential Attributes of […]
...moreAt the New York Times, Cara Buckley gives a quick rundown of a new J.D. Salinger biopic directed by Danny Strong (remember that kid from Buffy?) and starring Nicholas Hoult (remember that kid from Mad Max?)—”the man who gave the world Holden Caulfield and almost certainly would have never approved of this project himself.”
...moreWhat does “modern single woman” even mean anymore? Over at the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore investigates the idiosyncratic legacy of Helen Gurley Brown, the once and future editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan.
...moreIt just means that we have a desire for our language to be able to perform in a different way than it performs, and we have a desire for a reconciliation between the individual and the social that poetry can’t fulfill, but can help made felt. For Lit Hub, Cody Delistraty interviews Ben Lerner on his […]
...more… Initiation into the system of words Beckett was working with in the mid-1960s is more complicated, not least because the system was corrupted, a failure… Over at the Guardian, Chris Power writes about the short prose of Samuel Beckett, from first attempts “stinking of Joyce” to the complete breakdown of language itself as presented […]
...moreI mean, why not? Lit Hub puts Helen Phillips, author of Some Possible Solutions, in conversation with Matthew Vollmer, author of Gateway to Paradise, to talk about their writing processes: often, letting a story go off in strange, new territory. Like inside your belly button.
...moreSimply put, there is no theory without struggle. Struggle is the condition of possibility for theory. And struggle is produced by workers themselves. At The New Republic, Rachel Kushner introduces the newly translated 1971 Italian novel We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini, which takes place during a period of rapid industrialization in Northern Italy during the late […]
...moreShe made it clear that the body is not a stable foundation for gender expression. For New York Magazine, Molly Fischer profiles gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, focusing on how Butler’s theory of performativity has disseminated into pop culture in the thirty-six years since its inception in Gender Trouble, and how the conversations around gender […]
...moreWhen today’s crime writers are in doubt, they have a woman come through the door with a passive-aggressive zinger on her lips. At the Atlantic, Terrence Rafferty writes about the history crime fiction, from pulp writers in the 20s and 30s through Raymond Chandler to Gillian Flynn, and how women are writing the best crime out […]
...moreEverything was the most wonderful thing or the most terrible thing. Which is kind of an exhausting way to look at the world. It takes a lot of energy to sustain. For Refinery29, Gillian Orr interviews Emma Cline, author of The Girls, about her inspiration behind the book that netted a $2 million advance: the […]
...moreOver at The New Republic, Francine Prose writes about Frankenstein’s conception, as a bet in a drama-fueled writer’s group, as fueled by a young soon-to-be-mother’s anxiety, as a cleverly-plotted Gothic novel, as stories embedded in stories, as something altogether wonderful and shot through with dark.
...moreOver at the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes apocalyptically about the way our lives are changing for the worse with the advent of the Internet, smartphones, and “the cloud,” infecting every facet of our increasingly public lives. So, go outside, or something?
...moreOver at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon gives us a write-up of Ben Lerner’s new monograph, The Hatred of Poetry: a loathful ode to that to which we are in debt. And, read Ben Purkert’s Rumpus review of The Hatred of Poetry here.
...moreHelen DeWitt is interviewed by the Paris Review as part of their “My First Time” interview series, talking about the disillusioning process of having The Last Samurai published.
...moreOver at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joy Horowitz writes about what she called “the emerging genre of Slut Lit,” fiction focused on the woman’s body as it interacts with the world, as exemplified in three new releases: The Bed Moved by Rebecca Schiff, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mono […]
...moreFor the New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about the Middle Eastern writers finding refuge from the post-Arab Spring disillusionment and chaos in dystopian fiction, speaking with writers like Basma Abdel Aziz, author of The Queue, and Saleem Haddad, author of Guapa.
...moreSomeday, will it be not myself but my daughter that I hold? At Lit Hub, Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat and the newly released Some Possible Solutions, writes about parenting while (overly?) conscious of the critical eye, self-projected or otherwise, and finding moments of respite in the wonderful entropy of it all.
...moreAt Electric Literature, Amber Sparks writes about the short story as the critically darling but commercially nonviable art form it is—and how we need to stop telling short story writers to write novels.
...moreGrowing up does not mean we stop reading Marxist critiques or hating ourselves or feeling the grotesque contrasts writ large on every page of our petty lives. At the Paris Review blog, Sadie Stein offers a hilarious peek into her thoughts during a flight to San Diego, addressed to the teenage boy she sat next to […]
...moreOur entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. For the New Yorker, Nicola Lagioia, author of the forthcoming novel Ferocity, interviews Elena Ferrante about Ferrante’s own forthcoming novel, Frantumaglia. The two deftly touch on the interconnectivity of the “I,” what it […]
...moreUnderstanding tennis as aesthetic phenomenon involves returning to that word Wallace insists on using in his discussion of Federer: beauty. At Guernica, Greg Chase discusses the new collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, String Theory, in which tennis is investigated as an art form in light of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy on words like “beauty” […]
...moreVogue is turning 100 this year, and to celebrate they’ve pulled a favorite piece from their archives: Virginia Woolf, addressing what it is to love the work of an author, and why.
...morePlot has lost its prestige. Fighting against what he perceives as a changing of values in the modern novel, John Mullan writes an ode to plot, from the masterworks of Dickens and le Carré to the serialized TV dramas we all know and love.
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