For a female war photographer and novelist who’s dealt with pink covers on her books, male colleagues who dismiss the Orange Prize and a publisher who titles her book Shutterbabe, it’s pretty rich to hear that our world is apparently “post-feminist.”
Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front
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You Should Have This Title Read to You
When it comes to the pleasures of reading out loud, Michael Robbins isn’t so much interested in “why we find certain sounds in certain combinations pleasing or disturbing,” but he does enjoy “the hows.”
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50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
Recommended Reading: Anne Barngrover's poem "My Lover Vows to Follow Me Even after He Leaves Me" at Paper Darts. "If trust is to hem your promises/into my jacket lining like folded dollars during/an ice storm, then I have been trusting all my life."
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My Body Shall Be All Yours
“I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.” From James Joyce to Frida Kahlo, The Guardian collects bits of great artists' erotic missives to one another. And speaking of literary love letters, how about Nicholson Baker's Vox [ed. note: it makes a great Valentine's Day gift]?
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Banned Books Week
Comic of the Week: Over at Electric Lit, check out Grant Snider’s comic on why we ban books. We look at The Lorax and other dangerous books in honor of Banned Books Week.
Responding to Sexual Violence
“Eventually, the judicial bureaucracy begins to seem almost as destructive as the rapist.” Domenica Ruta writes on Emily Winslow’s Jane Doe January and Joanna Connors’ I Will Find You, two books that probe our culture’s failure to address sexual violence. Pair with a piece on poetry as a response to sexual violence.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Davies; Koch; Roy; Cardenas; Butler; O’Neil; McWhorter; le Carré; Shetterly; Boggs; Hochschild; Foer
Out this week: The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies; Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch; Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy; The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas; Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler; Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil; Words on the Move by John McWhorter; The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré; Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly; The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs; Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild; and Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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The James Ellroy Phenomenon
"His books used to be ink on paper; now we have to squint through the cloud of the Ellroy Phenomenon." And the James Ellroy Phenomenon looks like it will only continue: the author has announced plans for a second L.A. Quartet, the first of which, Perfidia, comes out next week.
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