There’s been a lot of talk about women breaking into traditionally male fields and hobbies, but in a blog post at The Missouri Review Caitlin Rosberg laments the continued underrepresentation of female characters and creatives in comic books. She then explores the work she’s doing to improve the situation by publishing women writers and artists in works like the Ladies’ Night Anthology. As she says, “I’m motivated in no small part by being able to say to those ‘make your own’ strawmen, ‘I do. I’m an editor contributing to published comic books. Are you?'”
Women in Comic Books
On “Influencers” and Filters
The publishers Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK have begun a “social media experiment” in which they’ll use PeerIndex to single out “influencers” to review and promote books. “Influencers” will be determined by the breadth and reach of their social media presence, and they’ll be selected based on their relevance to certain books. This kind of marketing is exactly what Eli Pariser warns about in The Filter Bubble. (For a quick summary, listen to his TED talk.)
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Don’t Be Her
Want to be a female travel writer? That’s great, says Jessa Crispin, just please don’t be Elizabeth Gilbert.
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Little Fiction’s Book Preview; Le Translation Preview
On their Tumblr, Little Fiction is previewing some of the books being released in 2014-2015 by authors they’ve recently worked with. Meanwhile, Chad Post put together “Le Translation Preview” to promote some international work being published this July. Think of both lists as complementary compendiums to our Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview.
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Glitterati
Ever got the feeling that literary life used to be a lot more glamorous? Well, thanks to this review, we now have some proof that it was. In The Times Literary Supplement, a review of Antonia Fraser’s new memoir, which includes her memories of meeting the Queen and dancing with T.S. Eliot. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Extremely Patient and Incredibly Careful
It looks like Jonathan Safran Foer will be publishing his first novel in eleven years next fall. The book, tentatively titled Here I Am, is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East including earthquakes and an invasion of Israel. Foer’s last novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success. Here’s a piece on JSF’s crazy, confusing, die-cut book Tree of Codes.
Said the Gramophone
Over at Words Without Borders, Esther Allen considers how to translate a song. As she puts it, “A song that almost everyone in a given culture at a given moment knows is a unique cultural artifact, a crystallized collective experience, a profound trigger that sets off a complex string of shared emotions.” Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on songs as triggers.
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