Leave it to Roxane Gay to come up with a novel format for an essay on the feminist novel. In the new issue of Dissent, she presents eleven theses on the topic, including references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Sample quote: “Not every novel that concerns itself with the lives of women is a feminist novel. Fifty Shades of Grey is not a feminist novel.” You could also read our own Edan Lepucki on the problem with feminist anthems.
For Her
Poetic Graphics
This week in book-related graphics: An image-heavy test that combines poetry with traffic signs from Ploughshares, and an infographic breaking down the most fearsome (and most useless) characters in The Iliad.
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Maggie Smith and Patricia Lockwood on Viral Poems
Maggie Smith discusses her new book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, and the pros and cons of having a poem go viral online.
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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Love Stories
“[Ludmilla] Petrushevskaya doesn’t write about isolated acts of depravity; she writes about universal ones,” says Michael Robbins in his review of There Once Lived a Girl. “What’s scary about her narratives is their implication that only the thinnest film, which might rip at any time, separates us from the chaos and breakdown they describe.” Our own Janet Potter also reviewed Petrushevskaya’s work this week, and she focused on the romantic hopes of its characters. “What’s remarkable,” Potter writes, “is not the love they find, but the fact that they’re looking for it.”
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The Atlantic Remembers Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s birthday was yesterday (176!), and The Atlantic took a moment to remember his gifts to the magazine, a relationship which began in 1869, and got Twain twice as much pay as other Atlantic contributors.
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“Cultivate Lightness”
What should you do if, horror of horrors, you find yourself appearing as a character in someone else’s book? Michelle Huneven shares her experience being fictionalized in an essay for The Paris Review. Her advice? “Don’t read too much into it. Cultivate lightness.” Pair with our profile of Huneven, “Not Lost, Just Rearranged.”