My piece in memory of novelist and rapier-tongued pundit Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, appears on Prospero, the online arts & culture publication of The Economist.
Appearing Elsewhere
“Simultaneously less explicit and more explicit”
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the upcoming Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, the novel that Slate writer Tammy Oler called “a rite of passage for teenage girls in the ‘80s.” Now, Willa Paskin reviews the new film, lamenting that it “acts as if it is just another life-affirming Lifetime movie about surviving terrible situations.”
#ReadMoreWomen
We encourage you to join Electric Literature's #ReadMoreWomen campaign. Their aim is to "challenge you to increase your consumption of women and nonbinary authors, and tweet at @ElectricLit with the hashtag #readmorewomen to tell us what you’re reading or recommend a book." Sounds good to us!
The Steamin’ Demon
“Every atom of my blood, form’d in the soil of this earth, runs hot / As I wheel through this snaked monster of steel, The Steamin’ Demon.” Ride The Steamin’ Demon at Six Flags with Walt Whitman. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s piece on how Whitman saved his life.
Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Pittard; Donohue; Cook; Gavron; Roth; MacFarlane; Barthelme; Rankine; Robinson
Out this week: Some Luck by Jane Smiley; Reunion by Hannah Pittard; The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue; Man V. Nature by Diane Cook; The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron; The Hundred Days by Joseph Roth; The Figures of Beauty by David MacFarlane; There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme; Citizen by Claudia Rankine; and Lila by Marilynne Robinson. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Stranger Than Fiction
This essay from Adrian Barnes at The Daily Beast on cancer and fiction and how the two mirror one another is eerie and fascinating. This review of Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby from The Millions addresses this tendency of writing and real world illnesses to feed of of one another.
Dear Diary
Lena Dunham's next book looks to be every bit as divisive as her first. The chapbook, Is It Evil Not To Be Sure?, is a collection of Dunham's college diaries from 2005 to 2006 -- or basically, that recurring nightmare you have that somebody might find and read your journal.
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The Business of Books
"Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the 'business of literature.' Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself." Twenty-first century publishing works in mysterious ways.