Flavorwire
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Nightwalking 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…
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Check 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…
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Factory 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…
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Like 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…
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BFFs 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…
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Literary 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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Fun with Jane
Awe-inspiring literary legacy aside, one thing is for certain: Jane Austen could definitely hang. A new collection of some of her shorter works shows the writer in peak form, sharply mocking her social milieu with expert comedic timing: The young Austen…
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The Other Brontë Girl
She was the Khloé Kardashian of nineteenth century literature, the Michelle Williams of her girl group, her family’s invisible Zeppo Marx. Over at Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer makes a case for the Brontë sisters’ own personal Ringo: Nothing sums up her…
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The Post-Postmodern Novel
For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon declares 2014 the year that the postmodern novel died and the year that autofiction—a “new class of memoiristic, autobiographical and metafictional novels”—rose to take its place.
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The Rise and Fall of Alt Lit
The Alt Lit community brought together a disparate group of writers and poets from the sorts of backgrounds often ignored by mainstream literary fiction, leveraging the Internet and building a loyal and dedicated following. Then this fall, allegations of a…
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Healing Words
This past week has seen an outpouring of poetry responding to the disappointment, violence, and trauma spurred by the Ferguson decision. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon challenges the notion that poetry written in response to political events is somehow less…
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Known Pleasures
In the wake of So This Is Permanence, a recently released archive of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s notebooks, Jillian Mapes reflects on why artists’ scribblings mean so much to fans: “It’s a human reaction to see handwritten things, as…