Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Afghanistan Video
Lukas and Salome Augustin's breathtaking video of Afghanistan is worth a full-screen viewing. (via)
The Books Coming from Ukraine
Citing the cliché that people “only become interested in a country’s literature once we start bombing in” as his reason, Chad Post takes a close look at some recently published Ukrainian books.
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Deft, Masterful
Passionate, intense, fearless … this essay on the history of book blurbs will have you positively clawing yourself with pleasure. We’ve blurbed about blurbs a couple of times here at The Millions.
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The Wounded Women
"Women writers who kill themselves—are somehow perpetually on display, or even on trial. They must answer for their art and their final act against the world and their husbands and children, born and unborn," Kevin Kanarek said in a Rumpus interview about his mother, Pamela Moore. Her 1956 novel, Chocolates For Breakfast, has just been reissued. Pair with: Alison Balaskovits' post on VICE's infamous fashion editorial on the suicides of famous women writers.
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Flowers of Evil
“Life is worth less than a line of Baudelaire’s poetry.” These two lyric essays by Chen Li over at Asymptote Journal are economical and well-worth the read. Though Chen Li is from Taiwan, he writes in Chinese; this syllabus of Chinese writing and the “New China” from Casey Walker at The Millions pairs quite nicely.
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Fairytales Revived
Fans of Hans Christian Andersen, a new edition of The Little Mermaid was published on Tuesday. Artist Yayoi Kusama has illustrated the classic fairytale.
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Help Her, Miss Manners
In the pages of the Washington Post, the venerable Miss Manners responds to an English department secretary who feels “besieged by fringe ‘academics’ who are very adamant that we are part of a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare.”
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