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Join NOW!Amber Sparks considers the popularity of Instagram, and why it is so loved: It offers us the opportunity to wander the halls of someone else’s mind, to enjoy their obsessions and juxtapositions. It’s a really weird-ass place if you spend enough time sitting there. It’s a place where we don’t have to explain ourselves, so […]
...moreFor VICE, Amelia Dimoldenberg asks people in London why they visit their local libraries. Since 2010, UK has lost nearly 350 libraries because of cuts in local spending. But the answers Dimoldenberg receives show how necessary libraries still are: “The library is a great part of the community, especially for young people who find it hard to study […]
...moreFor Guernica, Jen Karetnick interviews dancer Natica Angilly about dance poetry, its meaning, and how she became involved in it: Natural, developed, and studied efforts to share our singular and group experience are worth pursuing in all expressive languages, especially dance and poetry. The old philosophy that “the body does not lie” [motivates us] to create […]
...moreJillian Cantor explains what drew her to the women in history, Margot Frank and Ethel Rosenberg, that she wrote her two novels on. Cantor is intrigued by women in history whose stories are lost or forgotten, and uses her writing to tell their stories: …I began to think about what it might’ve been like to […]
...moreThe New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova reveals the cause of writer’s block, the psychological state of those that have it and those that don’t, and how to combat it: …many symptoms of writer’s block are the kinds of problems psychiatrists think about. Unhappy writers, it seemed, were unhappy in their own ways, and would require therapies tailored […]
...moreMaddie Crum reviews Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman, looking at the theme of racism prevalent in the new novel, who should read it, and more: The story’s thesis is wrapped up in when and how the Freemans choose to use sign language rather than spoken words; often, it serves the purpose of communicating what’s […]
...moreFor The Stranger, Rich Smith reviews Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the film about poet W.S. Merwin and his life as a conservationist in Hawaii: The film glorifies Merwin as a giver of life, a distinction that invites an eye roll. But looking at the evidence the film presents, it’s hard to call foul. […]
...moreAt Guernica, Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews John Freeman, the founder of the literary journal Freeman’s, on freelancing, his goals for Freeman’s, and cultivating narratives: Narratives are individual; after that they become myths because you need to abstract a narrative to make it apply to many at once. Literature is of course subjective and universal when it’s great, […]
...moreAuthor Sara Majka answers questions for City Lights Booksellers about not being a writer, the first book she finished reading as a child, and the hypothetical soundtrack for her book: I have this strange fear that people are going to ask me about music or ask me to create a mixed tape to help promote the […]
...moreWriters Dorthe Nors and Jarett Kobek discuss politics, Nors’s life in Denmark, writing on the Internet, women writers, and more over at Electric Literature: When you said that about a woman writing I Hate the Internet and ATTA, I felt in my stomach that you were right. If I Hate the Internet was written by […]
...moreOver at Book Riot, Hannah Engler discusses memoir, when the absolute truth is necessary, and why it is okay—even unavoidable—to fabricate facts: Fabrication is inherent in memoir writing. Number one, it’s impossible to have an unbiased view of your own life, period; number two, it’s impossible to write about something in the past tense and not […]
...moreHarper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away on Friday. William Grimes remembers her life and work for the New York Times: Looking back on her childhood as a precocious tomboy, Scout, the narrator, evokes the sultry summers and simple pleasures of an ordinary small town in Alabama. At a time when Southern fiction inclined toward […]
...moreChristopher Frizzelle shares a dazzling review of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, praising its ferocity and intense exploration of homosexuality: These “little theaters of heat,” these packets of desire or panic or imminence, these doublings-down of doubt and upswellings of confidence—these concentrations of feeling are Greenwell’s subject. The novel is explicitly set in Bulgaria, […]
...moreJohn Williams inspects the literary themes of love and death, and, in the same article, suggests a few reads as we enter the presidential primaries: Even readers less snarky than Wilde can be forgiven if fictional expirations meet with less than solemn reactions. As Tolstoy wrote in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The very fact […]
...moreSixteen female authors tell Susie Schnall about their experiences and struggles with work-life balance, and offer some wonderful advice to us all: I think it’s unrealistic to max out in every area of your life simultaneously—there’s just not time for everything. But if you’re able to prioritize certain elements of your life during certain periods, you […]
...moreMary Jo Tewes Cramb discusses the perpetuation of the “manic pixie dream girl” stereotype in John Green’s novels: In Green’s novels, there is considerable tension between the potent appeal of his manic pixie characters, the excitement and fun they bring into the narrators’ lives, and the messages these characters impart about their own lives and identities. […]
...moreArtist Nicholas Rougeux focuses on the punctuation of famous works by removing all of the letters in a text and arranging the punctuation in a spiral around a central image. Rougeux speaks on the purpose of his work: Rougeux doesn’t have any bold claims for what his graphics reveal about literature, writing, “I’m not sure […]
...moreTo commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, David Hayes and Sarah Weinman discuss what makes the book, as well as Capote’s other works, so remarkable: For centuries we’ve been enraptured and revolted, thrilled and petrified, by crime stories and what meaning they might have. So no wonder Truman […]
...moreHe says he’s not trying to predict exactly what might happen in the future, but instead offer a broad reminder that the present is not the finished portrait it might appear to be. Besides, he says, “We can’t be wrong: Everybody who reads this book will be dead by the time it comes true.” In […]
...moreHow much of the world has Amazon taken over? The Guardian talks with University Book Store and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, two independent bookstores, the former located less than a mile away from Amazon Books: …manager Tracy Taylor pointed out that many Elliott Bay customers are in fact Amazon employees. But she also said, with reference […]
...moreAn actress of color is predicted to play Nancy Drew in the upcoming CBS adaptation of Nancy Drew. At the Atlantic, Lenika Cruz reflects on this decision: The announcement will do little to quell fears that the future of entertainment will primarily be reboots, sequels, origin stories, prequels, and remakes; dooming audiences to year after year […]
...moreLauretta Charlton delves into Hamilton: The Revolution, the book based off of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular Broadway musical, Hamilton. Theater critic and author of the book, Jeremy McCarter, discusses the unique characteristics of the book: We knew from the beginning that the book ought to evoke Hamilton’s era, and one of the really distinctive things about books […]
...moreFor Slate, Laura Miller reviews the way old age is explored and rendered through literature, especially by those of old age themselves: The essays in Alive, Alive Oh! resolve in a stubbornly untidy fashion; Athill rejects the unspoken, oppressively conventional “wisdom” that dominates the personal essay today. “My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor […]
...moreDanniel Schoonebeek discusses with photographer Marshall Scheuttle the reason for his move to Las Vegas, the contrast of his portraits with his landscapes, and the emotional space that he arrives at when photographing an especially exciting subject: My favorite photographs have always given me this feeling that I’m a participant in something I can’t control. […]
...moreAt the New York Times, Katherine Rosman discusses Bill Gates’s blog, Gates Notes. Particularly, she considers Gates’s book reviews and recommendations: He rarely posts negative reviews of books, explaining that he sees no need to waste anyone’s time telling them why they shouldn’t bother reading something. He doesn’t spare himself, though. ‘I have a habit, which I […]
...moreWill women make as many cinematic strides in 2016 as they did in in 2015? Clarissa Loughrey struggles to remain hopeful as she anticipates the female presence in film for the coming year: 2016 may not look so hopeful to the eyes of cinematic women but, then again, some of the greatest triumphs of 2015 came as a […]
...moreAt Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow […]
...moreAt Salon, Gerry Canavan compares the bleakness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the gain and loss of hope in Star Wars: Star Wars has always been, in the EU at least, a universe more or less without hope, that only looked hopeful to casual fans because they were looking too closely at just a very […]
...moreIs the much loved bookseller Barnes & Noble turning into a nightclub? Not quite, but it is exploring the possibility of serving alcohol. The bookseller will be testing the sale of beer and wine at events in West Hartford before expanding the service into other stores. Although Barnes & Noble is not the first bookseller […]
...more2016 is the 400th year since Shakespeare’s death and, to celebrate the famed playwright, Hogarth Press will release versions of Shakespeare’s works reimagined by popular authors for the modern audience. At VICE, Hope Whitmore interviews author Jeanette Winterson, who will be reworking Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale:
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