That Kickstarter is offering more opportunities than ever to literary projects, from Coffee House Press’s Catstarter to the Joan Didion documentary to the Reading Rainbow spin-off, is indisputable. Now there’s yet another worthy cause turning to the crowd-sourcing platform in search of an audience: The Riveter, a magazine of longform journalism by women.
Kickstarting The Riveter
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
●
●
Wells Tower on Your TV Screen
Talk about burying the lede. This article about Alec Baldwin’s return to television acting, and how he’ll be playing “a Rob Ford-type mayor of New York,” doesn’t make a big deal out of the show’s pilot writer. But it should. Because his name is Wells Tower.
●
●
Books for the Trump Era
“[T]hat might be what liberal readers needs right now: Not just portraits of the Brexit and Trump-voting domestic Other, but a clearer sense of their own worldview’s limits, blind spots, blunders and internal contradictions.” The New York Times‘s Ross Douthat assembles a “Books for the Trump Era” reading list, including Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Christopher Lasch‘s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and Samuel P. Huntington‘s Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. You can also read our own review of Houellebecq’s latest here.
●
●
Taking Bets on the Nobel Prize
Popular bookmakers Ladbrokes have announced their opening odds for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Smart money seems to favor Haruki Murakami, who would surely take the prize if it depended on recent book sales. Meanwhile the next two favorites are Joyce Carol Oates (6/1) and Hungarian author Péter Nádas (7/1). All signs point to this being another year of disappointment for Philip Roth’s fans – his odds of winning stand at 16/1.
●
●
#LitBeat: The Common Launch
In the latest installment of #LitBeat our intrepid reporter Tiffany Gibert finds herself celebrating The Common and transfixed by The Dog House Band.
He’s Got Game. Literary Game.
I could tease and build up Allison Hill‘s article on “Literary Seductions“, or I could just let the first line entice you on its own: “I once slept with a man because he gave me a copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”
●
●