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
Master of Happy Scenes
Norman Rockwell was an unhappy and enervated man who became iconic by painting scenes of happy, energetic people. He developed a style that became synonymous with idyllic visions of America. At Page-Turner, Lee Siegel reads Deborah Solmon’s American Mirror, a new biography of Rockwell that acknowledges the painter’s contradictions without “mocking or scolding” him for the gulf between his life and his art.
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On Leading the Tiger
The Lovely Bones
Peter Jackson, beloved director of The Lord of the Rings movies, has turned his talents to an adaption of a very different book. He has directed a film version of Alice Sebold‘s The Lovely Bones (see the trailer here), the story of a young girl who is murdered and looks down on her family and killer from heaven. Saoirse Ronan will play Susie Salmon, the novel’s heroine. Ronan is perhaps making a career of cinematic adaptions of novels–she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Briony Tallis in last year’s film version of Ian McEwan‘s Atonement. Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, and Stanley Tucci also star.
Who Wrote What?
Do you want to work at The Strand in New York City? Think you have what it takes? Take this famous quiz and match each work with its author to see if you have the literary chops to pick up a paycheck from one of the United States’s most beloved bookstores.
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NO MORE
The US Navy will no longer write its internal communiques in all caps. Maybe they got tired of the sense that they were constantly shouting?
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Carver and Lish, Revisited
On the heels of our recent look at the dynamic between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, a close reading of versions of Carver’s stories, with and without Lish’s editorial involvement.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Basu; Fuller; Bollen; Spencer; Fallon; Laird
Out this week: The Windfall by Diksha Basu; Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller; The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen; River Under the Road by Scott Spencer; The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon; and Modern Gods by Nick Laird. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Women and Poetry: A Discussion
Elisa Gabbert organized a roundtable discussion with several female critics to explore the twinned questions a) why are more men being published than women? and b) is it because there’s “also a lack of women writing about poetry?”