“By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.” Edna Saint Vincent Millay, trendsetter.
Gibson Girl
Help Save Langston Hughes’s Home
You can help preserve Langston Hughes’s home in Harlem through this Indiegogo campaign. Pair with our own Tess Malone’s review of Tambourines to Glory.
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Book(case) Criticism
Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
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Vicious Circle
Michele Filgate was so terrified by Dave Eggers's The Circle that she quit social media for a week and wrote about the experience for Salon. "I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process." Pair with: our review of the novel.
The Golden Age of Women Essayists
The essay is more popular than ever. At Salon, Michele Filgate talks to Leslie Jamison (author of The Empathy Exams, here's our review) and Roxane Gay (author of the forthcoming Bad Feminist) about the power of the genre. Gay believes our interest in essays is because of a "cultural preoccupation with the exposure of the self." They also discuss if we're in a golden age of women essayists. "Sometimes when men write about private feeling, it’s seen as exploratory or daring, and when women write about private feeling it’s seen as limited or in the vein of a kind of circumscribed emotional writing," Jamison says.
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Tana French’s Accidental Writing
Aspiring writers who’ve long dreamed of critical acclaim will no doubt be slightly miffed at Tana French’s admission that her writing “happened by accident.” As the former actress explains to The Guardian, writing In the Woods was a subconscious, almost involuntary experience: “I thought I could never write a proper book, I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter.”
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Creeping Out the Invited Guests
It doesn't get much better than James Wood on Joy Williams: "Nothing is stranger (and funnier) in Williams’s work than her details. Like her forms, they only resemble conventional realist details, an atmosphere perhaps encouraged by her flat, functional sentences (“They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink”). The details are frequently surreal, magical, hallucinogenic, delivered in a cool, dispassionate, routine manner."
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Just Listen
For this month's fiction podcast at the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reads two Jamaica Kincaid stories, "Girl" and "Wingless," following the publication of Kincaid's recent See Now Then.
The Poem Heard Round the World
"It’s really strange to have the success of a poem be so directly tied to people processing grief. It’s a strange thing, because it’s a blessing and a curse." The Rumpus interviews poet Maggie Smith about her new collection, Good Bones, her viral poem that shares its name, and her craft. From our archives: Smith's collection was featured in our round-up of October's Must-Read Poetry.