From The Things They Carried to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, veteran literary fiction has always been popular, yet women are almost nowhere to be found in war literature. At The New York Times, Cara Hoffman argues that leaving women out of combat literature makes returning from war even more isolating. “They would be made visible if we could read stories that would allow us to understand that women kill in combat and lose friends and long to see their children and partners at home.”
Women at War
Guilty As Charged
"Why do readers, those who are bereaved and those with happy families alike, love orphans?"
Patron Half-Elephant
Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
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Creating Thought Experiments
Recommended (Hip) Reading: On the the pretensions of pop by Dan Fox at Guernica Magazine.
Ask Her About Her Uterus
"Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it." The New Republic writes about female pain, the medical community, and Abby Norman's book, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain.
“Can you lend me [Goethe’s] Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid” -Beethoven
Booktryst offers a peek at famed German novelist and (apparently) amateur physicist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colors, revealing Goethe as a sort of proto-Kandinsky.
Remain Ourselves
"Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” The remarkable love letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger are both touching and predictably philosophical. Here's a jarring, surreal reimagining of three works of Arendt's over at 3:AM Magazine.
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Freedom Looms
Franzen fans: Freedom, the long-awaited follow-up to The Corrections is now available for pre-order. The specs: 576 pages, August 31st 2010. "Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom’s intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time."
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The Reality of Slang
"What makes a word 'real'?" Should groan-inducing words like "adorkable" be counted? Anne Curzan, language historian, gives a Ted talk about the human element in dictionaries and the importance of slang.