With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
How Can I Help
“Often the people who turn most passionately to data and reason are those who feel most overwhelmed and controlled by irrational impulses.” New fiction by Rivka Galchen over at The New Yorker! Pair with our review of her most recent book, Little Labors.
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Street Smart
Fancy a stroll? Flaneur, a new Berlin-based magazine, profiles one street per issue. It explores the culture, literature, people, and landmarks that make each street unique. The first is Berlin’s Kantstrasse. Pair with: Hyperreal Cartography, a tumblr of “real maps of places that exist but don’t.”
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On “Unpacking My Library”
There’s a lot of (justified) talk about the power of reading, but simply owning a book can be meaningful. Mabel Rosenheck considers Walter Benjamin‘s perspective on book ownership – “[it] is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” – and her own experiences with book collecting in San Francisco in an essay for The Toast. Pair with Anne Fadiman‘s essay on relationships, books, and relationships with books, “Marrying Libraries.”
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Flannery’s Home
Over at The Paris Review, Wei Tchou travels to Flannery O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. As she writes, “The charm of Andalusia lies in gestures like this, the ones that urge you into feeling as though you belong. The place isn’t a fossil, it’s a home.” Pair with Nick Rapatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter.”
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Boyhood Tales
Random House is releasing a collection of previously unpublished poems and stories from Truman Capote’s youth, recently found in the archives of the New York Public Library. Over at Full Stop, Jacob Kiernan examines the keen political conscience in Capote’s never-before-published work. As he explains it, “While his early stories are structurally simple, they evince a prescient social conscience.”
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Paul Constant of the Stranger has a different critique of the Bad Sex Awards that he’s been repeating; namely, that literary fiction is too sexless as is and this contest supports that.