What’s in a font? I first saw this book in our local bookstore and assumed it was being marketed solely to women. It was some combination of the title, with the word “Beautiful” in it; the photographic cover; and the font, a curly script more often seen on Nora Roberts covers.
Tag / Books
Links We Loved This Week — 7/15/16
Heather at Go Fug Yourself posted an absolutely hilarious MST3K-style takedown of Vanity Fair’s dumb, sexist, Australia-stereotype-filled article about Margot Robbie. Don’t even bother reading the original — just read this.
Fun fact: Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer are longtime pen pals. Fun fact #2: Jonathan Safran Foer uses Hotmail to carry on this literary correspondence. The rest of the article is actually very interesting, but the Hotmail factoid made us laugh so hard. (via Nytimes)
The New Yorker hilariously satirizes all of the awkwardly misogynistic “thinkpieces” about female artists that have been skewered by several other outlets, most comprehensively by AV Club.
If you missed it last week, The Millions rounded up the most anticipated fiction books of the second half of the year. One highlight: the brilliant Michael Chabon is coming out with a new book! This week, they have a corresponding list for non-fiction.
At the Atlantic, read about how researchers have used sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional arcs of stories. It’s amazing how coherently many of the generated graphs hew to classic arcs identified by the researchers. (“Man in a Hole,” for example, sounds pretty much like the one we are all told to write in craft classes: things get worse, then finally they get better.)
Tracy Morgan returned to SNL after his accident last year, and this interview he did with the Times is beautifully emotional.
Links We Loved This Week — 7/8/16
A few words from Toni Morrison on writing blackness in The Bluest Eye (via The Guardian):
She would not, she decided, try to “explain” black life to a white audience. She would not write from the position of outsider to her own experience. She took issue with, for example, the title of Ralph Ellison’s famous novel, Invisible Man; as she told the New Yorker in 2003, “Invisible to whom? Not to me.”
She wanted to write from within. It was the era of “black is beautiful”; everywhere she looked in New York, the black power movement was promoting that slogan. It struck her both as true – “of course” – and at the same time, ahistorical and reactive. “All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying ‘screw whitey’, or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, ‘You have to confront the oppressor.’ I understand that. But you don’t have to look at the world through his eyes. I’m not a stereotype; I’m not somebody else’s version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful – yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn’t? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn’t beautiful. And you hurt.”
These photos of retired trains are gorgeous and eerie.
Lithub published a conversation between Nicole Dennis-Benn and Chinelo Okparanta, two big new novelists who happen to both be black and LGBTQ. Their conversation is full of wisdom about writing and literature, including the role of race and representation in writing, as in the quotation below from Okparanta:
It seems to me that as writers we do have the right to tell any stories we want to tell. As fiction writers, we can make up anything we want and present it as something akin to fact. This is the power of fiction. But where national politics, racial agendas—those sorts of things—are concerned, it seems to me that we, as writers, should also be conscious of social consequence.
We’re very sad about losing Luke’s crinkly smile, but we agree with THR that by cutting Layla, Nashville is losing its most complex and interesting character, with the most potential for growth (she’s basically season one Juliette). We would also add that Layla finishing her arc as a manipulative, deceitful villain is borderline antifeminist, not to mention that she has the best voice of any actor on that show.
Links We Loved This Week — 7/1/16
The British Library this week takes a look at WH Auden’s poems.
At We Minored in Film, Kelly Konda ponders the role of the thematically relevant backstory in survival stories.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a delicious piece of what is essentially Virginia-Woolf-inspired fanfiction about Melania Trump for the NYT.
Happy Fourth of July! 12 authors, including Teju Cole and Jay McInerney, picked their essential American books for Time. What would you pick?
Links We Loved This Week — 6/26/16
For those in NYC, happy Pride! Check out these photos from NYC Pride through the years at AMNY. It’s definitely cool to see the early days of the march, but 2013 is my favorite.
Probably the best-titled book list we’ve seen in awhile: the Millions has “A Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery.”
The Times’s fashion photographer, Bill Cunningham, passed away recently and the Times has a moving obit.
And finally, Robert Downey Jr. shared this amazing wedding cake on his Facebook page.
Links We Loved This Week — 6/17/16
There was a Friday Night Lights reunion in Austin. Where do Minka and Taylor think their characters are now? (at Vanity Fair via Lainey Gossip, which has lots of squee-worthy pictures of same.)
The New Yorker has a compelling piece on unREAL.
…beneath the giddy parody “Unreal” offers a singular meditation on stardom, media mendacity, sexism, and competition among women
The Bronte society is having some, errrr, issues (from the Guardian, via the Rumpus).
You’re the Worst‘s Aya Cash gives a typically funny and insightful interview with Indiewire. Give this girl all the Emmys!
An interesting piece from AV Club on the success of Scream and the curious subsequent disappearance of meta-horror. (But would Cabin in the Woods, You’re Next, and Tucker and Dale versus Evil have existed without Scream? Probably not.)
Writing Beautifully About Nazis: The Strange Failures of All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr’s body of work is filled with characters who have extraordinary gifts. In his earlier novel About Grace, a man could dream the future. In his short story collection The Shell Collector, people were gifted with everything from metal-eating to speaking with the dead. In his most recent work, the Pulitzer-prize-winning World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See, a young German boy has a preternatural ability to work with radios. And if Doerr himself has a near-magical gift, it is that of spinning sentences that each have the lush beauty and soft sheen of a perfect pearl—a gift on full display in All the Light We Cannot See.
Links We Loved This Week: 6/4/16-6/10/16
UnREAL: “Walter White in power heels: UnREAL is evil, twisted, unmissable TV” from The Guardian
Ploughshares takes a look at literary friendships throughout history. Didn’t know that Oscar Wilde inspired Count Dracula, but how PERFECT that he did!
The Tiny Doors art project in Atlanta shows you that “Not all doors need to be opened to be interesting” (via Atlas Obscura)
At The Millions, Kaulie Lewis writes about writerly jealousy. “When we say, ‘all of my ideas have already been had,’ what we’re expressing isn’t jealousy, it’s doubt in our own creativity, in our worthiness to write about anything at all.”
The Lola Quartet: Emily St. John Mandel
In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2012 literary “thriller” (misnomer though this may be for a novel that is more suspenseful than actively thrilling) a moderately successful reporter finds his life upended when his sister sees a photo of a young girl who looks exactly like him. Haunted by the possibility that he has a daughter he never knew about, Gavin slides into a life of fraud, unemployment, and finally violence. The seeming stability of his life was just an illusion; in fact, it is a net, on which he rested for years but through which he can easily slip.
In this novel, the world of crime and poverty is distinct from, yet terrifyingly close to, the everyday world of law-abiding, middle-class citizens. The stories of Gavin, the other members of the jazz quartet that sustained him in high school, and the girl who disappeared while carrying the mysterious child, weave a tighter and tighter web that draws every character under the surface of the everyday. Mandel shows skillfully how the rest of society maintains itself only through a conspiracy of denial, in which people willfully refuse to see the addictions, abuse, and trauma that hide behind the closed doors of their neighbors’ homes.
The novel, whose prose doesn’t have quite the mature elegance of Mandel’s most recent work, the spare and gripping Station Eleven, doesn’t make its characters round enough to render fully convincing the mysterious self-destructive impulse that propels so many of them. But it is a sensitive, gripping portrayal of how fragile a construction American “normalcy” really is.
Links We Loved This Week — 6/3/16
The New York Times writes a great article about the dystopian fiction of Middle Eastern writers.
The Millions has an essay on Ladislaw versus Lydgate, and Middlemarch‘s resistance to “good-on-paper” marriages.
Aww, Homeland’s not coming back till 2017.
(Spoilers for Me Before You below the cut…)
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