New this week: A Life in Men by Gina Frangello; Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux; An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine; The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol; Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor; and The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frangello; Theroux; Alameddine; Antopol; Minor; Schaffert
Western Culture is Rape Culture
Recommended Reading: Amy Gentry writes on the effects of rape culture and its permeations through art and literature. “I realize that what I’m describing here isn’t a list of books I’d like to see banned from the classroom; in fact, it is a list of my favorite books. It also a solid bit of evidence that Western culture is rape culture. Or, to put it another way: rape culture is just culture-culture. If only there were a trigger warning big enough for that.”
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Revisiting ‘The Decameron’ in Quarantine
Elyse Martin examines how Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron—a collection of "medieval Italian sex stories"—shows that storytelling is integral to our survival.
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Elena Ferrante’s Writing Process, Translated
“Patriarchal domination, even — despite appearances — in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don’t feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system. ” In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante discuses the #meToo movement, Naples and her writing process for the Neapolitan novels in a rare interview translated from the original French.
Congratulations friends!
Our friends over at the LARB have received two nods for the Pushcart Prize! Congratulate them by reading through the nominated essays: David Sheilds’s “Life is Short; Art is shorter” and Antoine Wilson’s “Notes on Hack.“
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Celebrating Beverly Cleary
With her 95th birthday approaching, Beverly Cleary gets the profile treatment in the Times. (previously at The Millions: Cleary’s underappreciated memoirs)