Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother, taught America a thing or two about decency and feminism: her scathing pen wrote books about the excesses of American society and its alienation of women. Over at Bloom, Cynthia Miller Coffel writes about this trailblazing woman who should be considered “the patron saint of middle aged women writers.”
Patron Saint of Decency & Feminism
August: Osage County Gets a Trailer
The first trailer has been released for the cinematic adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County. Here are two of my favorite scenes (one, two) from the play to whet your appetite. The film, which is directed by John Wells, is scheduled for a November release.
Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
●
●
Trethewey’s Inaugural Reading
Natasha Trethewey will give her inaugural reading as the U.S. Poet Laureate tonight at the Library of Congress. The event is free and open to the public, and some of Trethewey’s work can be found here, here, and here.
●
●
My Struggle Continues
Ben Parker has published a review in The Los Angeles Review of Books of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Four, which was recently translated by Don Bartlett. Read Knausgaard’s thoughts on repetition and its reflections in the natural world at The Millions.
●
●
On the Auction Block
It exists! The long-lost letter from Neal Cassady that inspired Jack Kerouac to write On the Road will be auctioned next month at Christies, ending an 18-month-long battle over its ownership and another 60-year-long battle over its existence. As Kerouac said, “It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better’n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.”
●
●