Recently rediscovered: a comic libretto by Raymond Chandler titled “The Princess and the Pedlar.”
The Princess and the Pedlar
Drunk Writing
Recommended Reading: Michelle Dean writes for The New Republic about the image of the tortured, alcoholic writer — and the “different kind of weight attached to a woman drinker.”
The Naval Academy’s Reading List for Life
What does it mean that so many faculty members at the United States Naval Academy have recommended Ayn Rand’s work on the “Reading List For Life?”
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Following Oscar
“To translate the power of Tish and Fonny’s love to the screen in Baldwin’s image is a dream I’ve long held dear. Working alongside the Baldwin Estate, I’m excited to finally make that dream come true.” Oscar-winning Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting James Baldwin‘s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk for the screen, says The Hollywood Reporter. (He’s also bringing Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to visual life as well.)
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Authentic Explanations
For Public Books, Matthew Clair considers authoritative black knowledge in intellectual practices and “the logic of racial authenticity,” which “stipulates both that black intellectuals have a particular responsibility to represent, in both senses of that word, ‘their’ people, and that, as racial insiders, they are uniquely capable of doing so.”
The VIDA 2011 count
VIDA, an organization that promotes gender parity in the literary arts, has tallied up the 2011 bylines and book reviews from some of the bigger magazines . Granta was the only publication to achieve parity, but they did have an issue devoted entirely to feminism, so that may be skewing the numbers. The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, and Harper’s are not making the cut. While institutionalized misogyny in any profession presents a problem, gender quotas are probably not the answer.
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Modern Canterbury Tales
If Chaucer lived today, The Canterbury Tales might look a little bit like this.
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