The Guardian
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Too Many Skirts and Dresses
There are a number of picture books with strong girl protagonists, however the majority of them are drawn in skirts and dresses. At the Guardian, Julia Eccleshare calls for more children’s books with “girls in trousers,” in order to campaign against this…
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A Year Of Only Women
Men need not submit to small press And Other Stories this year, as the independent publisher plans on only printing women in 2018, reports the Guardian. And Other Stories prints 10 to 12 books a year. The decision was made…
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Literature’s Crowdfunded Future
From small presses to literary journals, crowdfunding has grown into a major source of money for publishing. Authors are even turning to services like Kickstarter to fund their booktours, like Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star. Her successful campaign raised…
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Larkin’s Social Anxiety
Philip Larkin disliked literary parties. He also disliked giving lectures. His general dislike of public and social events led the British poet to push back against attempts to nominate him for a prestigious Oxford professorship. He also turned down the poet laureateship…
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Literary Cooties
A recent study by author Nicola Griffith reveals that books written about men were more likely to win major literary prizes over the last fifteen years than books written about women. During this timeframe, 12 Man Booker Prize winners and 10 National Book Award winners were…
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Library Queries
Before there was Google, there was the New York Public Library. Library patrons could query librarians by writing out questions on notecards. The NYPL found a set of vintage cards, and has been publishing them on Instagram. The Guardian shares some of…
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Short Story Long
Over at the Guardian, Chris Powers tackles David Foster Wallace’s short stories, and their place within his body of work.
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Mystery Maven Memoirs
In the wake of the destruction of precious cultural artifacts during the unrest in Iran and Syria, a quiet memoir from the queen of mystery, Agatha Christie, remembers the landscape and archeological legacy. The autobiographical Come, Tell Me How You…
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Travelling Without Moving
In the finished novel, this journey will take up four sentences. My virtual mapping of the route will have almost no discernible impact on the prose that I’ve already sketched out – as adjectives go, “nondescript” doesn’t paint much of…
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The Rise of the Mega-Novel
Serial novels are nothing new, especially in genre fiction designed to keep readers shelling out money for the next phase of a story. But the sudden, rapid success of fantasy genre series like George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and the…
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The Ways of Hemingway’s Heart
A new account of Hemingway’s love life—which famously spanned four marriages and could be said to include complex relationships with a number of male confidants—is forthcoming from A.E. Hochner, one of Hemingway’s dear friends in the last years of his…
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Before Twain Was Twain
Newspaper journalist Samuel Clemens would eventually go on to become novelist Mark Twain. But, Samuel Clemens was something of a story writer too. At the Guardian, Nicky Woolf reports that a scholar at the University of California has discovered and authenticated…