What if the Hulk kept a diary? Marvel Entertainment’s new young adult books mix superheroes with chicklit. The She-Hulk Diaries and Rogue Touch, featuring the X-Men super heroine as a teenager, are bringing romance back to comics. The biggest surprise, they’re actually good, according to critics at Wired.
Super YA
The Laughing Monsters Excerpt
Recommended reading: An excerpt from Denis Johnson‘s upcoming novel, The Laughing Monsters, is available from Work in Progress.
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The Gang
It’s hard to get a better glimpse of the postwar white male American writer than the essays of William Styron. In My Generation, a new book of collected nonfiction, Styron writes about a raft of his contemporaries, including but not limited to Philip Roth, James Baldwin and Truman Capote. In the NYT, Charles Johnson reviews the collection. You could also read Alexander Nazaryan on a book by Styron’s daughter.
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The Price of Black Ambition
“I have come to realize how much I have, throughout my life, bought into the narrative of this alluring myth of personal responsibility and excellence. I realize how much I believe that all good things will come if I—if we—just work hard enough.” Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay writes for VQR Online about “The Price of Black Ambition.” Pair with our review of An Untamed State.
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SRSLY PHENOMENAL
We live in a truly marvelous time. By that, of course, I mean we live in an age when students at the London School of Economics can hand in 98-page (PDF) dissertations about LOLCats.
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Prejudice and the Grotesque
Dave Griffith writes for The Paris Review about reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” an immigrant story set in the South, in the age of Islamophobia. Pair with Nick Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from O’Connor.