With April Fool’s Day approaching, it’s a good time to wonder: what kinds of horrible things will you do to the people you love? At the OUP’s blog, a list of great pranks for inspiration.
Prank Fodder
On Sexism in Literature
How do you feel about claims that men avoid reading women? Before you answer, consider this piece, which argues that sexism in the lit world is more complicated than it may appear. (For more, go check out our own piece on sexism on the internet, or else take a look at this Harvard Divinity School study on how sexism shapes responses to women’s writing.)
Sleeping in the Stacks
It’s not surprising when a graduate student claims to “live in the library,” but an NYU student really does live in the university’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. For only $225 a semester, the student rents library cubbies instead of an apartment. The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds, though, but is a response to the skyrocketing rent in the neighborhood.
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Jason Reynolds on the Language of Discussing Racism with Kids
Jason Reynolds discusses the goal behind writing a nuanced book on racism for children with Ibram X. Kendi.
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“Cultivate Lightness”
What should you do if, horror of horrors, you find yourself appearing as a character in someone else’s book? Michelle Huneven shares her experience being fictionalized in an essay for The Paris Review. Her advice? “Don’t read too much into it. Cultivate lightness.” Pair with our profile of Huneven, “Not Lost, Just Rearranged.”
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
“[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.” A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn’t nearly as much of a recluse as we’ve been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which “transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.”