As a young girl in the 1980s, Melissa Carroll played with My Little Pony dolls, in part because, as she puts it, “I knew I’d better have one.” Nearly thirty years on, she’s fascinated by the new surge of interest in the dolls, especially the interest displayed by the men who call themselves Bronies. At The Rumpus, her Sunday essay on the rise of the Brony and gender dynamics in America.
“A big furry fish in a tiny barrel”
Brand New Books in Your Ear
Hey book podcast lovers, Between the Covers has a new episode out featuring author Thalia Field on her fascinating-sounding novel Experimental Animals. For more literary listens, see our round-up of 10 more shows to check out.
DeLillo Reads in Brooklyn
Speaking of Point Omega, here’s Vanity Fair‘s write-up of a rare DeLillo bookstore appearance, complete with conspiracy theorists and a fainting fangirl. It was sort of like a visit to the World’s Most Photographed Barn.
Dragged In
Most institutions that become an essential part of a local culture build up a collection of curios over the years. They collect as much evidence as they can of their proximity to major events. At the New York Public Library, for example, you can find a letter opener whose handle is made from the paw of Charles Dickens’s dead cat. (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Zhang; Perrotta; Binet; Senna; Gurnah; Lish
Out this week: Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang; Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta; The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet; New People by Danzy Senna; Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah; and White Plains by Gordon Lish. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Doing More With Less
Nollywood is the name given to Nigeria’s $500 million movie business. For about the same amount of money that was spent on the promotion and production of James Cameron’s Avatar, Nollywood is able to churn out a thousand films each year, trailing only Bollywood and Hollywood in terms of revenue.
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Moonshoot
“Much has been made of the seemingly prophetic nature of Verne’s lunar stories: elements such as the distance and time to reach the moon, and even the launch and landing sites for the mission fall very closely to what actually happened during NASA’s Apollo program.” On the prophetic and historical power of Jules Verne‘s science fiction novels, including the works that later inspired the space program.
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Body Language
I’ve written before about By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which authors write short pieces about their favorite passages in literature. This week, our own Edan Lepucki — whose new novel you may have heard about thanks to Stephen Colbert — writes about the metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (FYI, Margaret Atwood wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
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