Recommended Reading: “When Literature Was Dangerous,” a history of censorship and the development of a culture “in which literature lacks urgency” and, perhaps, significance.
“Everything goes and nothing matters.”
The First Family of Letters
Want to become a successful writer? Get adopted by Stephen King. With five fiction writers to their name — Stephen, Tabitha King, Joe Hill, Owen King, and his wife, Kelly Braffet — the Kings have turned writing into a family business, according to The New York Times Magazine profile on the clan. Pair with: the accompanying article on "Easter eggs" found in the family's fiction.
Glenn Greenwald to Write a Book
“Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first reported on a trove of classified documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, will write a book about National Security Agency surveillance,” reports Julie Bosman. But then, of course, the NSA probably knew about this already.
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Science Fiction’s Race Problem
How can science fiction writers invent aliens and entire planets but not include multifaceted characters of color in their fiction? At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky discusses the genre's equality problem and analyzes how race is viewed in everything from The Left Hand of Darkness to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. "When that future unthinkingly reproduces current inequities, it seems like both a missed opportunity and a failure of imagination."
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Man Eater
Would you like your man-steak with green peppercorn sauce? At the LRB, Jenny Diski on Catalin Avramescu's Intellectual History of Cannibalism.
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