The Guardian
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Sci-Fi is the New Religion
We’re only a few centuries and a small apocalyptic event away from isolated communities of huddled believers worshipping the gospels of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Le Guin….Let’s not think about L Ron Hubbard. In the Guardian, Damien Walter argues that…
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Goodbye Chestnut, Hello Chatrooms
The Oxford Junior Dictionary takes the forefront this week in the debate over the pedagogy of reference books, as 28 authors join a public campaign to reverse changes that have ousted entries from the natural world in favor of those…
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Are Writers Better with Age?
Not everyone is going to make a “5 under 35” list. Actually, most writers won’t. Though the zeitgeist seems obsessed with youthful writers, older is often better, as this infographic from the Guardian charting the age of authors at the…
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The Uncomfortable Shock of Recognition
Over at the Guardian, Scottish author Irvine Welsh makes a case for Bret Easton Ellis’s often reviled, always controversial American Psycho as a modern classic. Welsh—the author of his own modern classic, Trainspotting—defends the novel, insisting that the qualities that make…
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Mr. Murakami’s Place
According to the Guardian, Haruki Murakami is soliciting fan questions through the end of January, offering his opinions and advice,” says Shinchosha Publishing, “on how to tackle all manner of difficulties.” The answers will be posted on his website, “Murakami-san…
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A Nobel Refusal
Jean-Paul Sartre became the only Nobel literature laureate to voluntarily decline the honor in 1964, but as newly released archives from the Swedish Academy reveal, it was at least partially due to a failure in correspondence. Sartre wrote to the…
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Science Fiction’s Diversity Makeover
For the Guardian, Damien Walter applauds the growing diversity of science fiction titles in 2014, particularly the work of Kameron Hurley and Anne Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice. Of Leckie’s work Walter writes: Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make…
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When Poets Become Novelists
Ben Lerner talks with the Guardian about life in Brooklyn, octopuses, and poets: “Poets really haven’t gotten the news that the novel is also dead,” he says, of the opinion among some poets that writing in prose is a capitulation…
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Lewis’s Spiritual Rebellion
For the Guardian, Hilary Mantel wonders where to “shelve” C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. While the work’s Christian themes make it tempting to label it as a “religious” text, Mantel argues that the book is complicated by Lewis’s “crisis of faith” after the death of…
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Dickens Gave Us Christmas, and Ghosts
Today there is plenty of fretting over the “War on Christmas,” but the holiday didn’t always hold such importance in everyday lives, even for Christians. Two hundred years ago, industrialization gave people a lot more to worry about than Black…
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Interest in Celebrities Wane
Readers have apparently grown tired of the celebrity memoir, with autobiographies and memoirs of famous people slowing in sales, reports the Guardian.
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Santa’s Little Helper
Santa’s elves spend all year manufacturing low-cost holiday decorations to bring Westerners Christmas cheer. The only problem? They aren’t elves, but Chinese factory workers. The Guardian explores life in the Chinese “Christmas Village” responsible for 60% of the world’s holiday…