Posts by author
Michelle Vider
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Heaven is (Probably) a Place on Earth
Mya Frazier writes for Aeon on the “heaven tourism memoir” (seen in books such as Heaven is for Real and The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven) and what its popularity as a genre suggests about the 21st century’s conceptualization…
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The Truthening of Science Fiction
Cecilia D’Anastasio explores the origins of science fiction via Lucian of Samosata’s True History. Lucian’s True History, a second-century satire of contemporary travel writing that took classical mythology and its monsters at face value. D’Anastasio questions the themes that define…
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Myth Remaking
For Lit Hub, Michele Filgate interviews Lidia Yuknavitch on her new novel, The Small Backs of Children, to explore the idea of new symbols and mythology for contemporary culture: I’m not clear why we have to limit ourselves to old myths without…
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Complements to the Canon
Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) writes for Seven Scribes on the experience of discovering novels by black writers to act as a necessary complement to reading Harper Lee’s reductive portrayals of race in Mockingbird and Watchman: These books, this canon, represented…
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Bloom and Grow Whenever
What exactly is the “Penelope Fitzgerald” problem? Perhaps it is indeed the ability to write one’s mind, with no regard for trends. The ability to do so comes from the wisdom of life experience combined with the time and space…
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NY or LA? Try Neither
At Hyperallergic, Claire Voon breaks down a report from New York’s Center for an Urban Future. The report’s findings include evidence that New York City has outpaced Los Angeles for sheer number of workers in the creative sector, while higher…
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A College Education, Measured and Graded and Ranked and Weighed
The [Department of Education’s] report states: “In today’s world, college is not a luxury that only some Americans can afford to enjoy; it is an economic, civic, and personal necessity for all Americans.” Most defenders of the liberal arts would…
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Librarians in Wartime
Over the holiday weekend, Linton Weeks wrote for NPR’s History Dept. on the critical role of librarians in World Wars I and II. Weeks spoke to Cara Bertram, an archivist for the American Library Association: The books that did make…
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The Man Behind the Ivory Curtain
At The Chronicle of Higher Education, the writer behind @AcademicsSay (better known as “Shit Academics Say”) reveals himself as Nathan Hall, an associate professor at McGill University. In addition to his reveal, Hall discusses how the popular Twitter account allowed…
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How to Build a Joan of Arc
For Pictorial at Jezebel, Kelly Faircloth interviews Helen Castor, the author of Joan of Arc: A History, a book that attempts to recreate the context into which Joan of Arc emerged in history: What was different about what Joan was…
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Detecting Genre
Like a detective novel, these books are characterized by a central mystery and the process of detection that leads to solving that mystery. The mystery, however, is not a crime—it’s a life. A person, usually only tangentially related to the…
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The Origins of Slang
Over at Full Stop, Tammela Platt reviews The Essence of Jargon by Alice Becker-Ho, a look into the origins of slang as a protection developed by marginalized populations.