At Guernica, Kirsten O’Regan delves into labiaplasty, a “relatively unregulated, frequently botched” and scarily popular new surgery. The oddest (and saddest) thing she learns about the procedure? Apparently a lot of young mothers urge their daughters to do it.
Ignore the Pornification
Negative Theology
Anthony Domestico writes on negative theology in the works of Joy Williams and Mary Rakow at Commonweal Magazine. Our own Nick Ripatrazone offers 50 reasons why you should read Joy Williams.
‘The Last Library’
A conference on the implications of Google's proposed settlement with publishers will highlight the massive role Google's scanning project will play in the future of books. "'This is the last library.' It's going to be extremely difficult for anyone else to create a similar digital library in the future, at least under the current laws."
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Neil Gaiman Does TV
Good news for all the Neil Gaiman fans out there–a new, four-part television series called Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories is set to begin filming in November. The series will focus on a selection of Gaiman’s short stories and feature a singular ensemble cast throughout. This should whet everyone’s appetite for the long-awaited television adaptation of American Gods, which is set to begin production sometime in 2016.
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RIP Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. The Colombian writer was a prominent novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch and won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work.
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When Technology Knows You Better Than You
Psychotherapist Ariel Garten redefines consciousness at TEDx Toronto. "The problem with escaping your day-to-day life," she says, "is that you have to come home eventually." Her question, which she answers in the affirmative, is whether we can "find ways to know ourselves without the escape? Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek? Can we live here and now in our wired web, and still follow those ancient instructions: 'Know thyself'?"
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The Art of the Novella
Taylor Antrim at the Daily Beast explores the art and business of the novella, and offers up a few recent “unexpectedly revelatory” suggestions.
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The Literature of Loss
"Loss isn’t science; it’s a human reckoning." The New York Times posts an e-mail conversation between Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O'Rourke on why we write about grief, following the release of Oates' memoir A Widow's Story and in anticipation of O'Rourke's own memoir of loss, The Long Goodbye.
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