Ruth Franklin rises to the defense of much-maligned (and newly retranslated) Emma Bovary.
Madame Bovary, Say Wha?
A Is for Apple
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Apples, plastic bags, teeth In The Guardian, Karl Ove Knausgaard attempts to explain the world to his unborn baby, object by object. Pair with our review of his epic, My Struggle.
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Writing Desire
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Covers That Were; Covers That Could’ve Been
Sean Manning of the Talking Covers blog spoke with a bunch of authors, editors and artists to take a long, close look at the work of Lorraine Louie, the designer “who came up with the uniform, De Stijl layout” of the inimitable Vintage Contemporaries. And while on the topic of book covers, check out Tammy Fortin’s “New Covers for Old Classics” series she put together for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Posthumous Praise
"The female writers whose work has most recently come in for enthusiastic appraisal are by no means a homogeneous group; their influences, preoccupations and style vary wildly." The Guardian profiles six women authors – Beryl Bainbridge, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Jenny Diski, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Molly Keane – whose posthumous legacies continue to grow. Alix Hawley wrote a fantastic tribute to Brookner here earlier this year, noting, "[n]obody does depression quite so elegantly."
All Stories Are Stories
Last week, I directed you to a piece in The Atlantic by John Yorke on the substance of stories. His argument: that all stories have one thing in common–their plot. Now, Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature suggests that rather it is all story structure models that have one thing in common–and that thing is bullshit.
The Elements of Style
Alexander Chee invites Ann Beattie, Matt Bell, and five other writers to reflect on the usage of the present tense, “the current preferred mode of the self-taught writer.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on grammar and Anthony Doerr.
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