Casey N. Cep ponders oppositional forces at work on two statues harkening back to the days of Maryland’s slaveholders. “More than tragedy or romance, history is filled with irony,” she notes.
“History is filled with irony”
George and Robin
Our own Elizabeth Minkel has been posting sights and quotations from a recent George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb event in London. You can check out her coverage over on Tumblr.
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Before the Fall
Calling a book “the spiritual prequel to The Road” is a great way to signal its command of dystopian tropes. It’s what Gabe Durham wrote about Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s recent YA novel Echo of the Boom. At The Rumpus, Durham interviews Neely-Cohen, who describes how he tried to give a metafictional bent to the novel. Related: we asked high school students to pick their favorite YA books of 2013.
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Disrupting the Truth
Recommended Reading: How social media swallowed print newspapers — i.e., the future of the book.
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A Confession
Cat Marnell and Alana Massey both have new books out, and they are, in their own ways, variants on the genre of "confessional" writing. In an essay for Slate, Katy Waldman unpacks their essential appeal and their arguments, describing how each goes about the task of reinventing the concept of the memoir. You could also read our interview with Massey.
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“Binders Full of Women”
Mitt Romney's debate remark about where he finds women when he needs to fill some jobs has inspired hundreds of witty product reviewers on Amazon.
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This is Your Brain on Austen
What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
A Bit Rusty
Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this -- who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prose pick greats that are no longer great.
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