Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
From Wharton to Woolf
Janie Crawford and Tea Cake on Air
To commemorate the book’s 75th anniversary, WNYC and WQXR Radio will present a live radio play of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. New Yorkers will be able to catch the broadcast on February 29th and March 1st, and then the rest of the nation can hear it in September.
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“I’ve escorted two e-partners to the edge of the grave”
Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz describes – in incredibly depressing fashion – his experience publishing Boom, a digital short representing his first foray into “the brave new world” of digital publishing. Two takeaways for aspiring writers that are not explicitly mentioned, however: don’t write without a contract, and be sure to use an agent from the get-go.
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Visible Man
Want to reverse a book ban? Start giving away free copies of the novel at your bookstore. Earlier this week, we reported that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was taken out of the Randolph County, NC school curriculum. But less than week later, the ban has already been lifted due to intense community backlash and a local bookstore undermining the decision. Board member Matthew Lambeth said, “I felt like I came to a conclusion too quickly.”
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Good Ol’ USA Trilogy
“While the revolutionary milieu that was the source of many of the book’s events may have vanished, we have our own milieu.” At The Rumpus, Will Augerot re-evaluates John Dos Passos’s The USA Trilogy. He concludes that Dos Passos is more relevant than ever. Pair with: Our essay on the polyphonic novel.
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“Silent and spotless”
At The Nervous Breakdown, an excerpt of Still Writing, the new book by Year in Reading alum Dani Shapiro. The excerpt comes on the heels of one of the site’s trademark self-interviews, in which the author laments of herself as interviewer, “You don’t pull any punches, do you?” (Related: our own Hannah Gersen talked with Shapiro about her book.)
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