Columns
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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Before There Were Super Bowls
It’s no surprise that a lot of us are sports junkies. Over at AnOther, Kate Little gives us the lowdown on Picasso, Hemingway, and Frank Stella and their favorite sporting pastimes.
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Carving the Uncanny Valley
Any Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A…
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A Music Drama (Actually) about Music
Netflix’s The Get Down is receiving quite a bit of attention for being the unicorn of music drama: for once, a show about a moment in musical history is actually about the music! Directed by Baz Luhrmann, the show is receiving accolades for following…
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Kid’s Lit: Team Order or Team Nonsense?
Children’s literature as a genre has grown exponentially from early morality-racked lesson books to modern goofy masterpieces such as Captain Underpants—how did we switch from Order to Nonsense, and have we completely switched over? At Slate, Katy Waldman sits down with…
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Who Says the Earth Is flat?
Read this at disinfo and find out. Are we really so surprised that “Flat Earth People” actually exist? The Flat Earth debate ain’t going away (one imagines that Donald Trump will say he believes the Earth is flat any day…
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R.I.P.: Naiveté
Nearly a decade ago, on what was then my first and only day in Paris, I saw a dead person for the first time.
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Weekly Geekery
Science fiction has a huge race problem, and stock solutions don’t cut it. You’re welcome: 19th century math genius gets Hamilton-ized. The electrifying history of modern fencing. Ah, Ancient Greece. Land of democracy—and human sacrifice? Controversy over a canonical character in…
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“The Way We Thought We Would Be Interested”
For the New Yorker, James Wood praises Joy Williams’s oblique precision: In Williams’s world, we are all wandering interlopers—adrift, trapped, groundless—looking for visitors’ privileges.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
London bookstores are turning off Wi-Fi access, hoping to keep buyers focused on books rather than the net. African-American bookstore Marcus Books is returning to the Fillmore District in San Francisco after being forced out of its previous home of…
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Soldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature
For NPR Books, Quil Lawrence talks with a handful of soldiers-turned-authors about the genre of war literature that has been catalyzed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These authors want their audiences to know that war is not all Hollywood-scale battle…
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The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison
Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviews The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison today in Rumpus Books.