Don’t feel embarrassed about that trashy novel you’re reading at the beach because summer reading has existed since the 19th Century. Craig Fehrman breaks down the history of pleasure reading. Also, check out our list of alternative “beach” books.
Your Ancestors Would’ve Read Dan Brown
Lemuel Gulliver Redux
Eighteenth century literature lives: This Christmas, Jack Black will play Gulliver in an adaption of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. See the preview here.
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Ask Her About Her Uterus
"Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it." The New Republic writes about female pain, the medical community, and Abby Norman's book, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain.
LMC Revival
Anyone interested in up-and-coming literary magazines should check out HTMLGiant's Roxane Gay's Literary Magazine Club. The next magazine will be Beecher's, which has just released its first issue.
Writing Catholic
Over at the New Republic Year in Reading alum William Giraldi writes his "Confessions of a Catholic Novelist," and they include ruminations on Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, as well as on the inevitable impact being raised in the Church has on his own work and the writing of many, many others. Giraldi's essay pairs very well with the work of our own Nick Ripatrazone, who has reviewed Giraldi's Hold the Dark, written about teaching Flannery O'Connor to high school students, and just this week discussed the current state of independent Catholic literature.
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Dispatch from Planet Earth
Excerpts from Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission are now available online in Ninth Letter. Morena combines flash fiction and prose poetry in his record of the phonograph record that was included on the Voyager spacecrafts. The record plated with gold contained 27 songs, 118 images, and greetings in 55 languages, and was meant to summarize all life on Earth for the extraterrestrials.
Black on all Sides
"The company has forged a chain uncommon in mainstream publishing: an unbroken line of black women, from the novel’s protagonist, via the author, to the editor, to the art director who created the cover art (featuring a black woman)." Meet the trio of Black women at Kensington Publishing who are changing (modernizing) the traditional lily white romance genre.
“I’m Waiting for the Man” to stop exploiting our logo
The Velvet Underground is suing to protect its iconic banana logo.
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In Defense of Bad Sex
We recently posted about the finalists of Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. (Morrissey’s List of the Lost was the winner!) Allan Drew writes at The Atlantic in defense of #BadSex.
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