Do famous authors owe it to the reading public to publish their unfinished works after death? Casey N. Cep traces the contentious history of writers’ estates.
Writing From Beyond the Grave
Sizzling
When did romance novels get such a bad rep? They weren’t always derided as somehow lesser than other books. At Jezebel, Kelly Faircloth delves into the history of the modern romance novel, exploring how particular stereotypes latched on to the popular genre. You could also read Julia Fierro on sex and the literary writer.
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The New Great Books
“How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?” Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
A Literary Thriller
Ahead of next week’s publication of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the battle over Stieg Larsson’s lucrative literary estate. (Thanks, Craig)
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Cheese!
“Should we understand a photographic document as being first and foremost an artifact of memory, a light-written ghost? Or is it more important to stress its status as a material thing created from pigment, silver, emulsion, paper, plastic, glass, silicon sensors, pulses of electricity? Or is the photograph primarily an opportunity to take or make, an arena for a special type of action?” On Polaroids, instantaneous photography, and memory over at The Nation.
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Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ – a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.”
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Yiyun Li on Reporting Fiction
When describing the process of writing her latest book, Yiyun Li sees herself as more of an impartial reporter than a novelist.
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The Experiment
“In the first few days of ‘publicly’ reading the book, I only received quizzical stares and saw people putting glasses on or slouching in their seats to better read the cover. It just so happened that it wasn’t until Black History Month that those silent stares turned into vocal encounters and my light commuter reading turned into a bit of a social experiment.” Recommended reading: Lauren A. White’s experience of reading How To Be Black in public.
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Other Ventures
What’s it like being a young journalist in a turbulent time for the business? Some of my fellow Medill grads and I have created a blog to discuss that and other pressing matters. If you’re a journalism junkie like I am, you’ll enjoy The Newshole. Check it out.Longtime Millions contributor Emre has started a blog called Live from Gybria, where he will chronicle his travels, his life as a Turkish expat, and his studies at my illustrious alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism. Luckily, Emre will still be posting here, too. In fact, we’ll be putting up some more of his reading journals here in the next few days.And congrats to Anne Fernald (proprietor of the litblog Fernham) whose book Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader has just been published.
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