Are critically acclaimed authors really terrible? Is feminism bad for women? New York Magazine runs down the greatest hits of what appears, in hindsight, to have been the Decade of Counterintuition (and, in the process, catalogues many of my personal bêtes noires).
Are Babies Racist?
“I can’t rely upon sex and violence to sell my books”
Meet Libi Astaire, the “Jewish Jane Austen” and a major figure in the burgeoning Haredi literary scene.
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Au Contraire!
“It’s not easy to choose only five books, so I made up my mind and decided to mention the five I can’t help reading again, once in a while, because they are still here for me today.” Here’s a list of five necessary French books that you should be reading, including works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Marguerite Duras.
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Leave Elena Alone
We can’t stop gobbling up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but we also won’t stop asking who Elena Ferrante really is. Why do we need to know the author’s true identity, asks Electric Literature? (Our own Michael Schaub revealed that he was Elena Ferrante earlier this year.)
Meeting Mr. Jacobson
“A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday… a smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered.” A profile of the new Booker winner and an exploration of his winning book, The Finkler Question, in the New York Times.
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High Art
What happened to the literature of clothing? Writers like Balzac and Proust wrote philosophies of clothing, but nowadays there seems to be a wall between literary writing and fashion. In Public Books, Mary Davis reads Women in Clothes, a collection which reveals a lot about how much our views of fashion writing have changed. FYI, Rachel Signer reviewed the book for The Millions.
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Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, poet laureate of the river
There are poet laureates for all sorts of things these days – Queens Borough, San Mateo County, Twitter, you name it – but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone being dubbed “poet laureate of the river.”
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I liked Rush Limbaugh’s quote (a sentiment not often observed in TheMillions) about the Newsweek story, “Are Babies Born Racist:”
“If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable?”