This year, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle for their groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic.
Wide Sargasso Theory
Kool As the Other Side of the Pillow
“If you lack a competent distributor down here, then consider me at your service. Nothing would make me happier than to drive Salems off the market for good and ever. It’s without a doubt the foulest cigarette in the history of tobacco-addicted man—a tasteless mish-mash of paper and dry weeds.” Boy, Hunter S. Thompson really hated Salems.
Publish or Perish, But Please Don’t Peer Review
The recent shuttering of the University of Missouri Press raises an important question for all academic publishers: is the cost of peer review to blame?
Dreaming and Writing
Maria Popova writes on Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams, childhood, and the unconscious. For The Millions, Chloe Benjamin writes about fiction and dreaming.
Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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Babies Don’t Like Snakes
The Greek gods and goddesses were nothing if not self-serving. From Mallory Ortberg over at The Toast, here is an introduction to Dirtbag Hera. Don’t you worry, Dirtbag Athena got her comeuppance, too.
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Hardly Working
Why is it okay to say “I’m working on a novel” but not okay to say “I’m working on my novel”? The former is a normal, straightforward, expression, while the latter smacks of arrogance and self-absorption. At Bookforum, Jesse Barron writes about the oddity of Working on My Novel, a collection of retweets (you read that correctly) of writers telling the world about their labors. It might also be a good time to read Dominic Smith on the number of novelists at work in America. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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2013 (Indie and Poetry) Book Preview
Justin Daugherty supplements our massive 2013 Book Preview with a short list of upcoming indie and small press titles. Elsewhere, Craig Morgan Teicher lists some of the coming year’s most exciting poetry. Anything you’d add to either list?