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
Still Here
For a man who’s retired, Philip Roth is still oddly present in the literary world. Ever since he announced his intention to quit writing, he’s made a stream of public appearances, including an awards ceremony at Yaddo one week after claiming he’d never appear on stage again. So what gives? In The Baffler, J.C. Hallman explains why writers can never really quit, in a piece that nicely complements our own take on literary retirement. FYI, Hallman has written for us.
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Robot Virginia Woolf?
You must obey (and read) your robot overlords! As if winning a literary award wasn’t already hard enough, a story co-authored by computers just made it through at least one round of judging at the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award competition in Japan. But don’t worry, you haven’t lost your job quite yet–the good news is that the programs still have “some problems … such as character descriptions.”
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Also, Empathy
Recommended Reading: In The Atlantic, Alaa Al Aswany shows how literature can inspire empathy by analyzing one word, “also,” in Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. Al Aswany also has a new book out this week, featured in our latest New Release Day.
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“Pardon me, where can I purchase a camel?”
It’s easy to forget that traders and travelers a millennium ago were as tongue-tied in foreign countries as college backpackers are today. How convenient for Silk Road travels, then, to have had a phrasebook translating between languages like Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mandarin Chinese.
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“To look worse after a haircut”
Come on, admit it: you wish English speakers had a word for “one who shows up to a funeral for the food.”
The Last Interview
Recommended Listening: Fresh Air on Melville House’s Last Interview series with Ernest Hemingway, Nora Ephron, and Philip K. Dick. For more interviews, check out who The Millions has interviewed recently.