Over at The Believer, Amy Benfer pens a paean to the serial novels of her youth. “They are the training bras of literature; books that teach young girls how to be older girls before they get there,” Benfer writes.
On Sweet Valley, On Nancy Drew
Prodigious by Design
Sometimes, when you read a lot of work by a single writer, you end up writing unconscious imitations of their work. The reliability of this effect raises an ourobouric possibility: what if you reviewed a writer’s fiction in their own style? At The Awl, Sarah Marian Seltzer reviews Henry James as Henry James. You could also read Charles-Adam Foster-Simard on binge-reading James’s fiction.
Jonas Take Me Somewhere We Can Be Alone
We knew she was trouble when Taylor Swift joined the cast of the Weinstein’s adaptation of The Giver. Billboard reports that Swift has signed on for an unspecified supporting role along with Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, and Alexander Skarsgard. The movie will start filming in Cape Town next week.
Lauren Bacall on Writing
“Writing a book is the most complete experience I’ve ever had,” said Lauren Bacall, who passed away on Tuesday. She wrote three memoirs over 30 years – By Myself, Now and By Myself and Then Some.
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Searching for Florida
“The older I get, the more my own boundaries seem to be fading, which is terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.” For The Paris Review, Lucie Shelly interviewed Lauren Groff about nature, spirituality, and her newest collection, Florida. (Our review called the collection “startling and precious.”)
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The Help: Feel-Good or Offensive?
Though it had a promising box office debut, The Help is ruffling some feathers for its portrayal of African American women. Roxane Gay sums things up nicely for The Rumpus.
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The First Perec
On the rediscovery of Georges Perec‘s first novel, Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere, a book “connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create—but not like anything else that he wrote,” from the New York Review of Books.
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I wonder what equivalent we boys had to read growing up. What was our training jock strap of literature? The best I can come up with is the Hardy Boys. I don’t think we really had much else in the way of serial young adult novels.