Album of the Week: Forced Witness by Alex Cameron
“Where does one draw the line when you as a person believe in progress, but as a writer feel like you need to focus on people who would challenge that, who would ask us to regress?”
...morePosts Tagged: Flavorwire
The Rumpus 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
We’ve gathered up our favorite gifting ideas this holiday season and put them together into one handy list!
...moreYou’d Prefer Not To
The Internet has been abuzz with grammatically incorrect chatter since the New York Times recently published an article heralding the end of the period. But Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon doesn’t expect that little dot to go anywhere anytime soon: Bilefsky’s piece — or any long piece without periods — is like a car without brakes. You […]
...moreOh I’m Sorry, Did I Break Your Concentration?
James Patterson’s new imprint promises to solve our modern conflict between reading and time. But the problem it diagnoses may be more for writers than for readers: Does Patterson want to produce garbage books for what he presumes are garbage minds? Of course not.
...moreLerner, too, Dislikes It
Over 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.
...moreNot Even Rumi is Safe from Hollywood Whitewashing
One of the world’s most read and beloved poets since the 13th century, and an immensely important artistic, academic, and spiritual figure in the Muslim community, is getting his own movie. So who is going to take on the leading role of Rumi, whose poems about love, faith, and spirituality have guided generations? Academy Award-winning […]
...moreA Young Nation’s Game
The Annual Library Budget Survey, published last week, found that libraries around the world have varying growth expectations for the coming year, with North American libraries tending toward negative. On the plus side, libraries in developing countries (with developing markets) are growing. Time to pass the torch?
...moreYou Keep Using That Word
I do not think it means what you think it means: Do words mean what the dictionary says they mean, or do they gain meaning through the way we use them? Any person without an agenda knows the answer is “both.”
...morePower Ballards
If you could bring one J.G. Ballard novel to a deserted island, what would it be? Although the film adaptations of Crash and the upcoming High-Rise might make those popular choices, Jason Guriel argues that Concrete Island deserves to be your top pick: As speculative fiction goes, this is sophisticated stuff; rather than imagine some […]
...moreMaybe-True, Half-Hearted Hemingway in Havana
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is a recently released film from director Bob Yari following the maybe-true misadventures of the late Hemingway and his years in Cuba, where he lived, drank, and complained after winning the Nobel Prize for fiction. A young author travels to Havana to learn from his literary idol and a tortured bro-mance […]
...moreWitchery and Wherefore
One thing that has become clearer and clearer in recent years is that violent extremisms are not created in a vacuum, but rather by human beings whose moral thresholds have been altered, often by resistance to societies that are failing them. At Flavorwire, Moze Halperin investigates the witch narrative through the ages, from the time of Macbeth through to […]
...more12 Lol-Worthy Gifs That Will Recuperate Feminist Praxis
Bitch is where many of today’s feminist internet denizens (yours truly included) got our start reading and writing about culture with a critical eye. In many ways, Zeisler’s book is a call to arms, asking us to return to a rigorous, systemic analysis. At Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer interviews Bitch founder Andi Zeisler on her new […]
...moreThe Story Behind the Story
At this stoplight, you might begin to think, “I’ve been here before, there is nothing new to notice.” But it seems to me that we actually live here, and we often fail to notice what is in our own yard. For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon talks about what we talk about when we talk about books.
...moreWires Crossed
By this point, the relationship between books and television is complicated enough to merit its own Netflix series. Or its own book. Or maybe both: Like lovers who share an apartment, they’ve started speaking and looking alike.
...moreEating at the Table of Another
The critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession with freeing minds, which quickly become isolated monads.
...moreAll Mixed Up
Is The Hunger Games feminist? Does it matter? Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer wonders whether we’re asking the wrong questions: It seduces us with a good-vs.-evil premise, but then muddies the entire thing in the gray fog of war.
...moreThe Whiteness of Literary Landmarks
From Alice Walker: Standing there knocking on Flannery O’Connor’s door, I do not think of her illness; her magnificent work in spite of it; I think: It all comes back to houses. Of all the preserved writers’ houses of the world, there are only four belonging to people of color that are open to the […]
...moreToo Much of a Good Thing
If you like some of the things, why not read all of the things? Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer wonders why fans lose steam as we near the completist finish line: Maybe we’re saving those final few books for a bad day… Or maybe we know that a final book is supposed to be less than stellar, […]
...moreGender Bias in Book Awards
Women are winning fewer book prizes than men. And narratives about women don’t fair as well when it comes to prestigious prizes either. In fact, looking at the data, the most likely to win a prize are books by men, about men and boys. As Sarah Seltzer points out at Flavorwire, its all part of a […]
...moreTrigger Warnings for Teachers, Too
It sucks to read through an essay and just abruptly read a student’s usage of rape as an analogy for, like, soccer. For Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer discusses the importance of trigger warnings in the classroom, for students and teachers alike.
...moreWhere We’ve Been
It’s hard to enjoy reading Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time when the stack of books on your bedside table keeps reminding you of all the cultural capital you have yet to consume. Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer wonders why we stop re-reading our favorite books as we get older: I’ve come to understand that I’ll […]
...moreIt’s Time to Rethink Everything
At Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon presents an excerpt of Tim Parks’s new book, Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books. In the excerpted section, Parks questions the simple idea of what “we want from writing.”
...moreThe Joy of Knausgaard
For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon works to define “contemporary” literature and wonders where Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle fits into the mix. What he ultimately argues is that contemporary literature is often “project based,” and that Knausgaard’s self-exploratory novel is the most definitive example of this kind of work in recent times: Not only does the title My Struggle claim for Knausgaard the […]
...moreNightwalking with Dickens
Long walks are among the most common creative practices, we’re told, for writers from a certain era: Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Blake come quickly to mind. Matthew Beaumont’s new Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London from Verso is a treasure trove of stories about these ambulating authors, and Flavorwire has a piece about how walking after […]
...moreCheck Your Magic
Muggle-born students of Hogwarts are an underprivileged class, while magic-born students enjoy unquantified privilege, argues Sarah Seltzer over at Flavorwire. Rowling creates a world where privilege and power are coupled together, just as wealth and race have allowed certain classes greater access to power in the real world: Rowling isn’t arguing that a wand is […]
...moreFactory Fiction
For all our worrying about essay-writing robots, it’s easy to overlook the Fordist production models already in place in the publishing industry. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon considers the implications of literature that is ghostwritten and consumer-driven: Under automation, fiction loses the power to alter what we think is possible. It becomes nothing but a […]
...moreLike Whatever
Art is problematic. Humans are problematic. Roxane Gay is a bad feminist. We know this, yet still we attack each other for liking Lil Wayne or Fifty Shades of Grey. Flavorwire‘s Sarah Seltzer wants us to stop telling women what they can and can’t like: I wouldn’t abandon the practice of critiquing art for its political […]
...moreBFFs in Elena Ferrante Novels
The literary idea that friends’ lives represent unmade choices, roads not taken, is applicable across gender and genre. Naturally, however, it has a particular resonance for women, because so many of life’s choices have particular resonance for women. Whether in 2015 United States or in postwar, pre-feminist Italy, women still feel like they have to […]
...moreLiterary Rumors
Flavorwire has a rundown of literary rumors, including speculations about Sylvia Plath’s death, Edgar Allan Poe’s drug addiction, and Stephen King’s Halloween traditions.
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