“Certain words have gone from being shocking to being neutered,” says Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, who has embraced the printing of “vulgar words” on her magazine’s cover since November of 2011. Ms. Leive is one of several women’s magazine editors who believe “magazines are catching up with other media, where women have been using explicit language for years.”
Passé Profanity
Hitler at Home
Read about Hitler’s vacation homes and how they shaped his image via propaganda in an excerpt from Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos at The New Republic. We reviewed Ben Urwand’s book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which discusses other propaganda surrounding the Nazi regime.
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Nevertheless the Artiste Persisted
"A quick scan of the literature shows that the writerly gaze has been most often turned on male artists and their creative processes and passions." Claire V Mullins aims to redirect this gaze with a list for Electric Literature of 11 novels about female artists, including Zadie Smith's latest, Swing Time, which we reviewed last year. Related: Elizabeth Silver on the rise of strong female characters and the death of the literary ingénue.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Waldman, Kline
A pair of debuts are making waves this week. Amy Waldman's The Submission ponders an alternate present in which a Muslim man is the anonymous winner of the search for a design to build the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Ernest Kline's Player One is a "genre-busting," pop culture-infused take on the virtual reality future that awaits us.
Magical Listening
At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion's Salvador and finds that it remains "immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror."
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The Winds of Winter Excerpt
"Somewhere off in the far distance, a dying man was screaming for his mother." Entertainment Weekly has the first paragraph of the next installment of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
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I Doubt The Authors Would’ve Been Thrilled With This
Deep South Magazine's Hunter Murphy compiled a list of "The Greatest Bromances in Southern Literature."
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Going Clear
“While guys spent time in these Seg cells calling out chess moves over the walkways or doing push-ups until their veins bulged from their temples, I was in my cell pecking away trying to create a different world for myself. Some kind of way I felt I could rewrite my future.” For The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog, Daniel A. Gross tells the story of the Swintec Corporation, the nation’s sole supplier of clear typewriters, whose largest market is prisons. Pair with our own Bill Morris on using his Royal to write.
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