“You should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children,” Ruth Graham wrote in Slate last week, stirring the proverbial pot of new adult fans of Young Adult bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park. A host of YA-defenders rose up to shout her down. “You should never be embarrassed by any book you enjoy,” Hillary Kelly responds in The New Republic, unrealistically (we’re embarrassed by quite a lot). For the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg cites examples of worthwhile, complex YA fiction we can certainly support: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Pushcart War, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Westing Game.
To read or NA to read
Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
This essay on the proliferation of gossip in journalism is adapted from Joseph Epstein's Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit. In it, Epstein discusses the problem of "how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism."
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Fighting the Taxman
Neighbor and sometime Millions humorist Jacob Lambert has published a piece in Philly Weekly on our street's travails with the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). I was there and it was a stirring mix of city politics and journalism in action.
Tuesday New Release Day: Crummey; Beauman; Yan; Wisniewski; Kapoor; Galera; Hulse; Hooper; Greenberg; Whitehouse
Out this week: Sweetland by Michael Crummey; Glow by Ned Beauman; Frog by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski; A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera; Black River by S.M. Hulse; Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; My Father’s Wives by the ESPN host Mike Greenberg; and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Emma Straub is not an orphan.
Flatmancrooked knows that writers need money, and commercials.
The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
“Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president.”
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Reading Lists for Fall
The editors at Poetry have compiled a reading list from their contributors' suggestions, and the result is a healthy mix of poetry books new and old. Pair their suggestions with Tom Nissley's "September Books: A Reading List for Beginnings."
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Literature and the Workplace
“Poetry is not connected to my professional work - it is my personal world," says India’s newly-appointed ambassador to Argentina, Amarendra Khatua. Indeed, Khatua’s but the latest high-profile figure in Indian government to turn to creative writing to seek “emotional refuge” and a means of “battl[ing] workplace blues and the stress of decision making.”