slate
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant talks sex workers’ rights, labor politics, the novelty of women’s sexuality, and her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.
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Getting Personal
In response to Slate’s viral article about the rise of the “harrowing personal essay,” prominent editors from different publications weigh in on the importance of confessional writing, reasons for its gender divide, and the publishing process behind it.
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Why Internet Comments Suck
Wittgenstein explains why discourse on the Internet sucks. And it’s not just because of your crazy uncle. So, language is quicksand—except it’s not. Unlike the parlor tricks of the deconstructionists who bloviate about différance and traces, there clearly are rules that…
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Can’t Read Italian? Ask Mom To Translate
After reading the first two books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Sara Goldsmith enlisted her mother to translate the third book from Italian so that she didn’t have to wait another year for the English release. Now, for Slate, Goldsmith shares how…
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We Wish to Go to the Festival
After 13 years, another Milan Kundera novel has been translated into English for all us provincials who never learned French. At Slate, Benjamin Herman praises The Festival of Insignificance for its lighthearted wisdom: Insignificance is the work not of a grumpy old…
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Intergenerational Cycle of Crap
Gabriel Roth has some hard truths about The Poky Little Puppy, and he’s not wrong. Millions of people enjoyed The Poky Little Puppy as children, because it was cheap and because, being children, they had no standards. They grew up to be…
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Bringing Up Baby
Shirley Jackson’s bone-chilling story “The Lottery” is probably the last thing anyone wants to associate with Mother’s Day, yet her lurking plot twists and sharp character insights are the perfect tools to write about parenting. In this month’s Slate Book…
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Finding Kurtz
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is driven by the search and discovery of Kurtz, the man turned mad by Africa. Kurtz is the pale white colonizer who rapes the continent, is also worshiped by the native population, and provides fodder…
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When Critics Miss The Point
For Slate, Cristina Hartmann explains how The Great Gatsby went from a marginal publication to a central part of America’s literary canon. According to Hartmann, much of the novel’s early struggles emerged from criticism that misrepresented Fitzgerald’s satirical position, as critics stood too…
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How to Move Your Arms While You Talk
Slate looks at the 1857 book Sanders’ School Speaker: A Comprehensive Course of Instruction in the Principles of Oratory and its illustrations of what you should do with your arms when you talk.
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People Read Everywhere
Photographer Lawrence Schwartzwald finds people reading just about everywhere. He’s been going around New York City, snapping pictures of people reading books in unlikely places. Slate caught up with Scwartzwald, who explains his fascination with people and their books: You…
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A Sonata’s Variation
So now, 125 years after Kreutzer’s 1889 publication, Tolstoy’s wife gets to have her say. Sofiya Tolstoy, indignant about the violent and misogynistic plot of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata, wrote a novella in response to the book from the female’s character…