“The only kind of drama is human drama. What matters is how deep you dig.” At the Ploughshares blog, a case for science fiction over “dysfunctional family dramas.”
Speculation
Keep Hope Alive
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
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You’ve Been Sleeping on Romance Novels
“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Jamie Green writes for Buzzfeed about how romance novels have gotten more feminist over the years (and still getting a happily ever after) and people are now starting to sit up and take notice.
The Millions at the Critical Hit Awards
Hooray! Electric Literature has declared Jesse Jarnow’s Millions review of Fear of Music the winner in the category of Best Deconstruction for their occasional Critical Hit Awards.
The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”
Revisiting Recent History
“I should probably write a few words about 2015, but the year is stale now, rung out like a damp dish rag and left to dry in the cold, dour winds of some rundown burg blasted off the map by poverty and overcast. 2015 has been recorded, logged, and filed away as History, and as an American, I abide by my country’s allergy to revisiting History.” Catapult’s Mensah Demary on the tradition of New Year’s resolutions.
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A New Tradition
The New Yorker has launched an online-only series dedicated to the novella, featuring longer works of fiction the magazine isn’t able to fit into print. “The novella is not, usually, an expanded story. Rather, it is a contracted novel, in which the omissions cover much ground. It is more ambitious than a story, denser and more gemlike than a novel.” Callan Wink’s In Hindsight launches the series, with an interview with the author.
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