“The Books of Magic makes The Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, Harry Potter, and even Twilight all look like entries in the same broad genre of tween-superhero fantasy, in which someone insignificant gets mighty powers, fights the forces of evil, and ultimately triumphs. …The pop culture landscape starts to look like an endless row of Tim Hunters, the same successful formula applied again and again.” From The Atlantic, a look at how Neil Gaiman‘s The Books of Magic prefigured the runaway success of Harry Potter and the modern YA fantasy-adventure craze.
Harry Potter Before Harry Potter
Return of the Ferrante
“According to an interview with her publishers in the Italian literary newsletter Il Libraio, translated in The Guardian, Ferrante is putting pen to paper once more.” A year after Elena Ferrante‘s alleged true identity was revealed by a journalist, the intensely-private author is writing again but has no plans to publish a novel in 2018. Pair with: staff writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee‘s essay on Ferrante, privacy, and woman writers.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rayner; Yuichi; Jangfeldt
Out this week: Another Night, Another Day by Sarah Rayner; Ground Zero, Nagasaki by Seirai Yuichi and Mayakovsky: A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt. For more on these and other great titles from this year, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Life in the Company of Writers
Arisa Wright hits the nail on the head in this piece for LitHub, titled simply “In Praise of Our Black Women Poets“: “Clifton’s remark disabused me of the idea that there is something I must erase to make my poetry universal. She freed my mind and body; she freed my verse.”
Most Time Is Upside Down
“I HAVE A FLOWER. OHO. SUDDENLY WE’RE NOT SO SKEPTICAL, ARE WE?” I know it’s 2016 and he’s been dead for almost two hundred years now, but these otherwise inexplicable texts from Samuel Coleridge (by way of Mallory Ortberg at The Toast) are hilarious and totally believable. Some earlier hits include texts from Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy.
A Hunger Games Odyssey
The team behind the film adaptations of the Hunger Games trilogy have chosen their next project, and it’s not another hip YA series. Instead they’re going back to the classics and adapting, what else?, The Odyssey.
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Every Word of The Great Gatsby…On Stage
In this week’s New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about the 8-hour staging of the full text of The Great Gatsby – “Gatz” – at the Public Theater. She and actor Scott Shepherd discuss it on a podcast.
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