Avril Haines, the new deputy director of the CIA, had an interesting career before landing in the Langley. According to a Washington Post report, Haines used to own an independent bookstore in Baltimore, where she “welcomed patrons for the occasional readings of high-toned erotica over chicken tostadas.”
The Bookseller Turned Spy
The Vampire Diaries
“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up. She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”
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Qiu Miaojin’s Survival Guide
Qiu Miaojin was a Taiwanese novelist and lesbian activist, and her short life has had a profound impact on queer literature since her suicide in 1995. Recently Bonnie Huie received a PEN translation grant so she could bring Miaojin’s best-known work, Notes of a Crocodile, to an English-speaking audience. You can read an excerpt of Huie’s translation on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop online publishing platform, The Margins.
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Flexible Cinderella
On the persistent popularity and flexibility of Cinderella, from old folktales featuring talking gourds all the way to the upcoming Disney version, from NPR.
Read a Book. It’s Good for You.
Good news for us bookworms. New research indicates that regular reading and writing activity throughout one’s life can “slow down cognitive decline in old age.”
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Profiling Edward P. Jones
The Washington Post offers a long profile of the still underappreciated Edward P. Jones. We learn he hasn’t put a word of fiction to paper in four years but has been writing in his head. “‘I write a lot in my head,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been driven to write things down.'” (via @keelinmc)