The Guardian
-
LitHub Launches
Lithub, a new web endeavor from Electric Literature with partnerships between publishers, magazines, journals, and existing websites, launched yesterday with the aim of becoming a portal at the center of the literary world. The Guardian caught up with site editor…
-
How to Read in the Modern World
There are many distractions in the modern world like television and listicles. As a result, people aren’t reading in the same way they did a half century ago, opines Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian. All is not lost. Aside from…
-
The Consequences of “Prize Culture”
Over at the Guardian, Rachel Cooke reflects on her experience as a judge for this year’s Folio prize and shares what reading the eighty submissions revealed to her about the state of British and American fiction: The British social history…
-
Autism on the Page
Even if we already know our identity, proper representation helps us accept that identity. It’s well-established that negative/no representation has awful effects on self-esteem. When we see no one like us—or when we’re only ever the troubled sibling, never the…
-
The Politics of Genre
The Guardian explores why crime fiction tends to lean left, while thrillers often are more conservative.
-
Tranströmer in Memoriam
Tomas Tranströmer, the beloved Swedish poet and Nobel laureate, has passed away at age 83. Tranströmer was notable for the economy of his work, its quiet optimism, and the insights it brought from the poet’s long career as an industrial…
-
The Most Common Rhetorical Device You’ve Never Heard Of
Like its cousin apophasis, litotes is one of the stealth bombers of the rhetorical world – its anonymous ubiquity defies reason and gives it the power to strike at any time, without warning. The Guardian explores litotes, a rhetorical device…
-
Rationalizing Friendship
At the Guardian, A.D. Miller wonders why writers struggle to describe the “bonds” of friendship in fiction. What he finds is that close friendships are often difficult to “rationalize” because they limit access to common literary tropes: Friendship denies writers the…
-
The Stories of a Story-Hater
“I hate literature,” wrote Varlam Shalamov in a 1965 letter. “I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories.” Despite his claim, Varlam Shalamov would become one of the most prolific Russian writers, producing 147 short stories about…
-
The Best Worst Cover Art
Thanks to the Guardian, we are now aware of a little blog called Kindle Cover Disasters. The site collects the best of the worst e-book cover art ever to be copy-and-pasted on a home computer using Photoshop and some stock photos.…
-
The Mystery Of Misleading Titles
For the Guardian, Moira Redmond considers the prevalence of “misleading” book titles. The article references a number of well-known texts including Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which Redmond suggests is “sublimely about non-housekeeping.” However, Moira argues that “allusive titles” are not without merit: “They can be intriguing…
-
The Best Year in Literature
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for books ever.” The Guardian wonders, though, what other years could…