Emily Gould awkwardly prepares a salad with Tao Lin in the latest installment of Cooking the Books. (via The Awl)
Emily Gould and Tao Lin Make a Salad
The Problem with String Theory
Don't tell Paul Murray, but apparently "string theory," much beloved by artists and fringe physicists alike, has zero proof to back it up.
●
●
Fifty Shades of Sociological Commentary
In her new book, Hard-Core Romance, Eva Illouz has published the first serious, book-length academic analysis of the Fifty Shades of Grey. The critically-panned Fifty Shades trilogy, originally a Twilight fan fiction, has sold 32 million copies in the US so far. At The New Republic, William Giraldi seizes the opportunity for a brutal send-up of author E. L. James and the “dreck” she represents. "At least people are reading,” he writes, “You’ve no doubt heard that before. But we don’t say of the diabetic obese, At least people are eating.” Pair with The Millions’ essay on literary predecessors in published fan fiction.
The case against writing manuals
In The Atlantic, Richard Bausch makes a case against writing manuals: "The trouble of course is that a good book is not something you can put together like a model airplane."
●
●
The Brexit Diaries
“This inconvenient working-class revolution we are now witnessing has been accused of stupidity—I cursed it myself the day it happened—but the longer you look at it, you realize that in another sense it has the touch of genius, for it intuited the weaknesses of its enemies and effectively exploited them. The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be fragrantly, shamelessly wrong.” Year in Reading alumna Zadie Smith shares her thoughts on Brexit.
The 80-page Rule
How do you know if the book you're writing is going to fly or flop? Try writing the first 80 pages without worrying about the outcome as Meg Wolitzer does. "Eighty pages is enough pages for a writer to feel she’s accomplished something, but it’s not so many pages that, if she decides to put aside the book, she’ll feel as if she’s wasted her life," she told the Daily Beast for its "How I Write" series. It must work because we loved The Interestings.
●
●
To Burn, or Not To Burn
The Russian Ministry of Culture has come under fire recently after accusations were levied by the Russian Writers' Union of some 500 books having been removed from libraries by authorities in the Komi republic–and another fifty allegedly incinerated in the process. Most of these were textbooks published with money from the Soros Fund, run by hedge fund billionaire and very vocal Putin critic George Soros. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture has denied the accusations, stating that "if any books are declared ‘extremist’ through a court proceeding, they are put into the special list of the ministry of justice and immediately withdrawn from libraries. However, even in this case books are not destroyed, they are just not lent out to readers."
●
●
The Yellow King’s Clue
Recommended Viewing: Artist Todd Spence has drawn True Detective as a series of Hardy Boys novels. Pair with: Our essay on what female detective novels to read after True Detective.
●
●