Full Stop Goes Partisan

In her Shelf Awareness interview, Hilary Mantel admits that Wolf Hall, her recently released Bring Up the Bodies, and the trilogy’s forthcoming conclusion were originally conceived to be one book. That they kept expanding, she says, is “the torment and joy of writing fiction.” Meanwhile, over at The Daily Beast, the English author rounds up her five favorite historical fictions.

“When author Kamila Shamsie challenged the book industry to publish only women in 2018 to help address a gender imbalance in literature, just one publisher took up the challenge.” And Other Stories, an English publisher who publish translations and English language books, has decided to only publish women writers in 2018, according to the BBC. Pair with: an essay by our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee about the visibility and privacy of women writers.

The American Writers Museum, until this point nothing more than an idea floating around the mind of its board members, now has a concept plan laid out in a lovely 32-page booklet (pdf).

“The only way to get something new out of language, to try and get to what feels like the nearest simulacrum of truth, is to bend and shape that language, to break it’s form and strain against it, to coax it into a shape, to play with it. To revel in the disorderly.” Madeleine Watts writes about Eimear McBride‘s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (which our own Hannah Gersen recently reviewed), the limits of language and the necessity of a “Girl Canon” for The Believer‘s blog.

Pankaj Mishra caught up with Orhan Pamuk in the midst of Turkey’s Gezi Park turmoil, and though the Nobel laureate was at first “reluctant to speak of the protests,” he occasionally let down his guard. In those instances, writes Mishra, Pamuk “revealed a shrewd political mind and a confidence about the new social consciousness the demonstrators represent.”