A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation covers Gaddis, Müeller, and the Nordic masculinity of Per Petterson, among other topics.
New Quarterly Conversation
Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
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Bethanne Patrick’s Bottom 10 of 2009
Book Studio's Bethanne Patrick's Top 10 and, perhaps more interestingly, Bottom 10 Books of the Year. Patrick minces no words on Lethem, Kingsolver, Niffenegger, Moore, and Larsson.
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Do You Listen to Your Hunch?
Complex problems do not necessarily need complex solutions, and more detailed analysis does not necessarily improve a decision, but often makes it worse. In other words: sometimes it's better to listen to your gut. What do you do?
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Poetry Is Politics, Politics Is Poetry
Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, "The white students aren't being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop."
An Animated Dalloway
This week marked the 90th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway's publication. Over at The Paris Review, Sadie Stein posted an animated adaptation of the novel, which she describes as "either the worst or the best... depending upon how highly you value things like coherence, tone, and style."
The Believer Book Award
To add to the awards lists, Believer has announced its editors' shortlist for the Believer Book Award, which looks to acknowledge "the strongest and most underappreciated" novels of the year. The shortlist includes Danielle Dutton's Sprawl; Kira Henehan's Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (reviewed for The Millions); James Hynes' Next, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps (reviewed for The Millions); and Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (reviewed here).
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