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.)
On Sexism in Literature
Book World
“These days…the brick-and-mortar bookstores that are still standing have a loyal following.”
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Falling in Love with Language
“When I heard Afro-Brazilian people speak Portuguese, first in films like City of God and Bus 174, and then live and direct in Bahia, I fell hard for the ease, lyricism, and lilt in their voices which reminded me of the Anglophone Caribbean family and community I grew up in.” Over at Words Without Borders, Naomi Jackson reflects on blackness in Brazil.
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If Shakespeare Was a Programmer
“While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise—a matter of following rules—it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive…. With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language.” Angus Croll imagines Shakespeare as a programmer in a piece for Quartz and in his book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript.
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There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
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A Laugh for the Jobseeker
At McSweeney’s: “A GREAT JOB OPPORTUNITY!” (Funnier/sadder if you’re jobless right now.)
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Culture Club
Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
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Intersections and Turns
Recommended Reading: Noy Holland on writing fiction, a form rooted in deft timing, accidents, and revelations.
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Perry’s “Oops”
“Oops is everything that Perry could not do if he still wanted to be President.” What you missed while not watching last night’s Republican Debate in Detroit.
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My wife makes this claim about me regularly. Even when I show her the books I’m reading and loving (recently: The Middlesteins, The Flamethrowers, Magnificence, everything by Marilynne Robinson, etc.), she’ll say: “Oh, well, yeah, but that’s not ‘really’ women’s lit.” Seems like an impossible thing to disprove once the accusation has been made…