Fellow children of the ‘90s will remember how much that decade was a kind of Golden Age for disaster movies. Then as now, explosive blockbusters like Independence Day, Twister and Dante’s Peak satisfied a collective appetite for wide-scale destruction and mayhem. At The Morning News, Ethan Gilsdorf considers what the genre’s evolution has to say about us.
Boom Boom Boom
Summer Marketing Season
It's that time again. Out come the bathing suits and beach-focused marketing campaigns. Allison Duncan dissects the category of the "beach read."
●
●
●
Reading Rainbow Forever & Always
For every reader who grew up enamored with LeVar Burton‘s now-cancelled PBS show, Reading Rainbow, there’s fresh hope. A Kickstarter campaign to create a spin-off, web-based version of Reading Rainbow that aims to spread literacy to children in under-served schools was launched yesterday and has already received a significant portion of its funding goal. While there are some concerns about the project, the nostalgia factor is incredibly strong, and who doesn’t want to spread the love of reading to children?
●
●
Swamplandia! Gets Top 10
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, (who I interviewed last February) is having a very good year. She has a spot on the NYT list of the 10 Best Books of 2011, and last month HBO optioned the novel for what they describe as a “half hour comedy series.”
●
●
Confessing / Confiding
“I wanted to offer my students an alternative to the purely confessional mode. I wanted them to write about themselves without falling into a paralyzingly portentous tone. I wanted more humor in their work, more complexity, more detail, more balance—more good writing. I wanted fewer italicized passages, less use of the breathless present tense. I wanted no more tears in the workshop, no more embarrassing scenes.” Emily Fox Gordon writes about trauma narratives in the classroom, the trouble with writing as therapy, and the key differences between confessing and confiding in an essay for The American Scholar.
87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston
New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be published next week.
It’s Tuesday: New Releases!
New this week for bookfans: Novels by Nicholson Baker and Nadeem Aslam, as well as a foray into young adult lit by Jane Smiley.
●
●
Foxconn Workers Get Pay Raise
It started with Mike Daisey, and eventually led to a series of profiles in The New York Times, but ultimately Apple launched a serious audit of their Chinese sub-contractors at the Foxconn Technology plants. Now, thanks to increased awareness, those workers will see 16-25% raises in pay.