Over at Electric Literature, Tara Isabella Burton likens the experience of reading her ex’s favorite book – in this case Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity – to “rifling through someone’s letters after a death.”
“To do so, I felt, would be too dangerous”
Read what you want.
After last week’s NYT “Room for Debate” feature, ostensibly in answer to the question of why so many adults read YA fiction, Roger Sutton at the Horn Book took umbrage at the panelists’ only partial engagement with the question. In the end though, he makes his own position clear: “I don’t worry about adults reading YA novels. Read what you want.”
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The Social Function of the Novel
Recommended reading: Tim Parks asks “what is the social function of the novel?“
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The Giver Trailer is Out
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Listening to Joyce
We’ve written before about various rare recordings of authors reading that occasionally surface on the internet (a sample here) but today we add a new author: James Joyce. Open Culture has posted two recordings of the author reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and while the audio quality is exactly what you would expect for recordings made in the 1920s, we still recommend listening.
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The Golden Age of Hip Hop Writing
Throughout the 80s and 90s journalists turned hip hop into a literary movement. Pitchfork dives into that time and explores their legacy and impact on journalism and other literary forms. “Eager to extend the outer boundaries of their creativity, many of these writers would go on to ink novels, memoirs, short stories, scripts, and poetry, much of which stayed true to the language and attitude of hip-hop, as though their words were drafted to the sound of a boom-bap beat. It all added up to a low-key literary movement that writer and activist Kevin Powell has dubbed, ‘The Word Movement.'” Includes a great reading list at the end.
“A big furry fish in a tiny barrel”
As a young girl in the 1980s, Melissa Carroll played with My Little Pony dolls, in part because, as she puts it, “I knew I’d better have one.” Nearly thirty years on, she’s fascinated by the new surge of interest in the dolls, especially the interest displayed by the men who call themselves Bronies. At The Rumpus, her Sunday essay on the rise of the Brony and gender dynamics in America.
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