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Literary Alimentary
"After mixing the drink, sit back and fan yourself with the wide brim of a Kentucky Derby hat." Thanks to Ploughshares, you can impress your friends by serving them The Great Gatsby – to drink.
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On Remembering and Forgetting
“We have all heard the claim, ‘the victors write the textbooks.’ Among the many ways to unpack the phrase is this: that once upon a time history was bound to and relied on communally agreed upon facts. That is to say, there was not a culture of record the way there is now. There were not cameras and photographs capturing all human movement or digital archives where information was stored in 'clouds.' While our methods for remembering have evolved, the ethical question at the heart of recollection remains: how do we tell about the past and who gets to tell it?” Lindsey Drager writes for the Michigan Quarterly Review about memory and storytelling.
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For Her
Leave it to Roxane Gay to come up with a novel format for an essay on the feminist novel. In the new issue of Dissent, she presents eleven theses on the topic, including references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Sample quote: “Not every novel that concerns itself with the lives of women is a feminist novel. Fifty Shades of Grey is not a feminist novel.” You could also read our own Edan Lepucki on the problem with feminist anthems.
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The Investigation of Feeling
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with Citizen author Claudia Rankine about willed ignorance and the known unknown.
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In love with the entire family
We're a little late to The Guardian's Families in Literature series, which includes essays on everyone from the March sisters to the Moomins and has been running for the last few weeks. A particular favorite is Moira Redmond's look at Brideshead Revisited's Flytes and the strange but true power of falling in love with an entire family, which pairs well with our own Lydia Kiesling's Modern Library Revue of the novel.
The Lonesome Death of Lit-Fic
Guernica picks a scuffle with the VQR's Ted Genoways over what's killing literary fiction. (Writers? Editors? M.F.A.s? How about late capitalism? Or the term "literary fiction?" Or the surfeit of articles about its demise?)
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