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
“Go Read Alice”
The diary novel may be “an under-attended” genre, but Johannah King-Slutzky is trying to remedy that. In an essay for The Hairpin she traces the diary novel’s history from the Victorian era to Go Ask Alice while examining the genre’s balance of “melodrama and awkward moralizing” with the potential for subversion.
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New Chabon Story
Recommended reading: A new short story from Michael Chabon is now available from Tablet.
On Race and Rankine
Recommended reading: Nick Laird writes about Claudia Rankine‘s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric and “A New Way of Writing About Race” for the New York Review of Books.
DFW, Viking Enthusiast
The New Yorker gives us a glimpse of the David Foster Wallace papers just sold to the Harry Ransom Center, including the youthful “Viking Poem.”
How Do You Like Your Copy?
Lit Hub has brought Benjamin Dryer and Mary Norris together to discuss their love of editing, copy mistakes writers often make, and more.
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Where She Was From
For only $1.65 million, you can have a piece of Joan Didion’s childhood. Her high school home, The Didion House, is on the market in Sacramento. Before you make a bid, it might be good to brush up on California with Didion’s 2003 memoir, Where I Was From.
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Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ex-Husband Can also Write a Memoir
The former Mrs. Elizabeth Gilbert–that is, Michael Cooper, the husband Gilbert left at the opening of Eat Pray Love, has apparently written a book about his life after their divorce. Will it ever be published?
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