According to the title of Matt Steinglass‘ new essay (a qualified rebuttal of Katie Roiphe‘s recent piece “The Naked and the Conflicted“), “Today’s Male Novelists Do Write Exuberant Sex Scenes, But Mostly Lesbian Ones“
Matt Steinglass Contra Katie Roiphe
Scrabble Shake-up
We've all had that annoying moment of finding the perfect word to win Scrabble with, except that word doesn't count. Now, Scrabble is letting players nominate a new word to enter its dictionary. You can submit on Facebook. Just do us a favor, and nominate something better than "hashtag" or "selfie."
Murakami to Release Third Volume of 1Q84
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Two Tumblrs Worth Seeing
Consider these two Tumblrs as late additions to my three-part (one, two, three) taxonomy of literary blogs. Writers at Work is three years in the making, so we're a bit late to the party, but Erasing Infinite, which creates erasure poems out of each page of Infinite Jest, looks like it’s got a long way to go before it’s finished.
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Life in Letters
“To age is to understand that the powers of total recovery are gone, are no longer anticipated (except by those who, having lost their marbles, no longer know what to anticipate).” The epistolary legacy of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Bishop offers invaluable insight into the process of growing older, writes Robert Fay for The Atlantic. See also our own Lydia Kiesling on the narrative possibilities of leaked emails.
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Desire and Freedom
Recommended Reading: Can desire thrive without freedom? On the works of Margaret Atwood and Michel Houellebecq in The Atlantic. Our essay on Atwood’s vision of the future and review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism pair nicely.
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Free Wodehouse
PSA: Many of P.G. Wodehouse’s earliest stories are available in the public domain. (h/t Anna Wiener)
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