“The fiction of normative value(s) invests itself in the legitimation of the public sphere.” Finally, you don’t have to make up your own bullshit, with this nifty academic writing generator!
The normative, the gendered body, etc. etc.
Ishiguro Interviewed
“Maybe in the future I’ll feel compelled to write that kind of specific and current book, but right now I feel that my strength as a fiction writer is my ability to take a step back. I prefer to create a more metaphorical story that people can apply to a variety of situations, personal and political.” Electric Literature interviews Kazuo Ishiguro about his most recent novel, The Buried Giant, which our own Lydia Kiesling reviewed here.
Silly Prizes
In a piece with which our own Mark O’Connell probably agrees, Tim Parks explains the Nobel Prize for Literature’s inherent silliness.
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New Chabon Story
Recommended reading: A new short story from Michael Chabon is now available from Tablet.
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Favorite Debuts
Tin House assembles a panel to name its favorite debut novels and collections of the year. Swamplandia! and We the Animals get tapped, but some lesser known titles also make the cut.
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“Go Read Alice”
The diary novel may be “an under-attended” genre, but Johannah King-Slutzky is trying to remedy that. In an essay for The Hairpin she traces the diary novel’s history from the Victorian era to Go Ask Alice while examining the genre’s balance of “melodrama and awkward moralizing” with the potential for subversion.