A Séance of a Book: Talking with Allie Rowbottom
Allie Rowbottom discusses her debut memoir, JELL-O GIRLS.
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Posts Tagged: Jane Austen
Fandom and Family: Talking with Ted Scheinman
Ted Scheinman discusses his deep-dive into Jane Austen superfan culture, Camp Austen, how the Internet has fostered fandom culture, and whether being an editor helps his writing.
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The Neoliberal Heart of the 90s Romcom
The personal is political, to the extent that politics itself can be effectively effaced with no detrimental effects.
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President of Smut
Our country has always been ruled by and for the privileged, but never has this glaring injustice in the system been made so shamelessly clear.
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Finding Comfort in the Discomfort: Talking with Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez discusses his debut collection Best Worst American, his relationship to the English language, and why Nabokov ruined his writing for years.
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Mixed Feelings: Why Do Men Always Want to Settle Down?
Many women do want to get married, and that’s a perfectly reasonable choice. The problem, then, is that when a woman says she doesn’t want to marry, many people find this hard to believe.
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Concubines and Expat Husbands: Catching Up with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan discusses her new novel, Sarong Party Girls, concubine culture, and the freedom of writing fiction after a career in journalism.
...moreIn Sickness and Friendship and Jane Austen
Long before Curtis Sittenfeld was a New York Times bestselling author (Eligible), she was friends with Sam Park (This Burns My Heart). And they’re still friends: in an essay for the New Yorker, Sittenfeld chronicles their decades-long platonic romance, from early days collaborating on “50 Most Beautiful Sexiest Men Alive of the Year at Stanford” to dedicating their […]
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The Rumpus Review of Bridget Jones’s Baby
Perhaps Bridget fans who watched the movies but never read the books might not find this movie to be such a hard blow… But those who read the books—and those who loved the pilgrim soul in Bridget—will feel the loss more keenly.
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
...moreKeep Minor Characters Minor
At the Guardian, Charlotte Jones takes issue with the recently announced Pride and Prejudice sequel fleshing out the life of Mary Bennett—a character whose neglect is central to Austin’s plot: The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason she so often features in lists of our favourite literary characters – relies solely upon […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Schiff
Rebecca Schiff discusses her debut collection The Bed That Moved, choosing narrators who share similarities with each other and with herself, and whether feminism and fiction-writing conflict.
...morePride, Prejudice, and Reality TV
For The Millions, David Busis chats with Curtis Sittenfeld about her recent release Eligible, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. In the interview, Sittenfeld discusses the challenges that come up when modernizing older works, and how reality television served as a useful tool in her novel. Sittenfeld also shares what she admires most about […]
...moreRemaking Jane Austen
At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter interviews Curtis Sittenfield, author of a modern re-write of Pride and Prejudice, on why she decided to tackle the famous novel, and more: The novel has already proved polarizing among Austen fans. “Sadly disappointing, this book is just trying to cash in on the popularity of Austen’s characters,” one angry […]
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The Last Book I Loved: The Loss of All Lost Things
I recognize something in the stories… It’s the culture of “I made it” versus the culture of staying behind, the culture of achievement versus the culture of guilt.
...moreInsincerity and False Candor
For the New Yorker, David Denby listens to Jane Austen’s Emma and reflects on how listening to the book highlights the insincerity of the its characters: Austen was one of the first modern writers, one of the first thoroughly to understand the unconscious and such things as insincerity and false candor. She understood that we are almost invariably […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Using your English degree while coding. One foot in the real world, one foot in a story. A return to blogging? Or just marketing. Could robots be Renoir?
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
...moreBrain Training
Great news for avid readers! It turns out that intense reading is good exercise for your brain. Over at Open Culture, Josh Jones writes about a study by Michigan State University Professor Natalie Phillips, who compares the brain activity of participants alternating between a close read and a casual perusal of a chapter in Jane Austen’s […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Lori Rader-Day
Lori Rader-Day discusses her second novel, Little Pretty Things, the “five lost years” when she didn’t write at all, and her favorite deep-dish pizza.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
...moreWord of the Day: Esemplasy
(n.); unification; to make into one; the unifying power of imagination; accredited to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Austen is far from superficial … Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with a modern sensibility. She is, in essence, timeless.” –Alexander McCaul Smith, from “The Secret of […]
...moreFun 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 is hardly proper. She writes of drunkenness (in fact, she’s rather fond of the phrase […]
...moreA Literary Love Affair
Using Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History as a starting point, the New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman traces our romantic love affair with books, identifying the point where reading novels stopped being mainly an intellectual activity and transformed into an emotional one.
...moreJane Austen: Teen Historian
Brain Pickings looks at Jane Austen’s “History of England,” a satirical pamphlet penned by the then 15-year-old Austen and illustrated by her sister Cassandra.
...moreAusten Family Letters
The LA Times reports that unpublished letters and poems from Jane Austen’s family have been acquired by the Huntington Library. While none of the letters are from Jane Austen herself, the correspondence will still “provide valuable insight into Jane Austen and her world.”
...morePride, Prejudice, Repeat
Jane Austen has been blowing up these days, with hundreds of fan-fictional responses to Pride and Prejudice gracing the dusty corners of bookstores and the Internet. Over at Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer wonders why we’re still so eager to return to Pemberley: Because Austen doesn’t overload us with sensory details about her characters, but merely depicts […]
...moreThe Novel of Economics
Following her essay about the influence of Adam Smith’s economic theories in Jane Austen’s novels, writing at The Atlantic, Shannon Chamberlain gets back to the topic, this time debating what influence fiction had, and in particular the emerging genre of the novel, in Smith’s production: “Perhaps this sense of turmoil, of progress that could still be undone, […]
...moreSeriously Serious
Over at the Paris Review, Jason Novak has taken up the pen again; this time, he’s turned to authors and their eccentricities. Among his observations: “Somewhere Hemingway is sitting quietly at his desk. Pouring another bull. And fighting another drink.” Other targets include Don DeLillo, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nabokov, Heidegger, and the state of Publishing […]
...more“Don’t Go Online” and Other Good Advice for Writers
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Sisterland and guest judge of McSweeney’s first-ever student short story contest, told McSweeney’s in an interview that she is looking for fiction with a “pulse,” that engages “in a kind of conversation,” and that serves the writer’s obsessions. She also goes into her own history as a writer, including current projects: […]
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