The novelist Julie Schumacher wrote her latest, Dear Committee Members, entirely in the form of letters of recommendation. The format allowed her to illustrate the travails of a creative writing professor through a medium often ignored in fiction. At The Awl, Jessica Gross and Merve Emre talk about the novel. Pair with: Cathy Day on academia’s novel crisis.
Just a Formality
Villain’s Law
Over the weekend, Canada’s National Post ran a book review by our own Michael Bourne, who contributed a piece on Bright Lights, Big City this week. In the review, Michael reads Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, which he says reaffirms the rule that bad guys are always more interesting.
Get Excited For The Belmont!
I’ll Have Another scratched from the Belmont yesterday, which dashed our hopes of seeing the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, but you can still get excited for today’s race by checking out this beautiful passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood-Horses.
Ideology: An Introduction
For the theory-obsessed, soon-to-be liberal arts graduate on your list: the essential Verso Books undergraduate reading list.
Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.
Alice Walker on Screen
Still deciding what to do this Friday night? Watch PBS’s new documentary on Alice Walker, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, at 9 p.m. EST. At The Daily Beast, Agunda Okeyo discusses the history of the film’s production, which took six years. “Stories about women of color told by women of color are sidelined and neglected in favor of our stories being told by white women and men,” director Pratibha Parmar says.
●
●