“I asked myself – why don’t I state the race of my characters? And am I doing something wrong by not explicitly including a diverse cast of characters? Could I be doing something better? The short answer is yes.” An argument in favor of race bent fanfiction and resisting assumedly white characters from The Missouri Review blog.
Don’t Assume
Philosophy’s Monster
Frankenstein was originally a philosophical novel, Michael Saler reveals in his review of The Annotated Frankenstein. Mary Shelley used her monster to comment on the terrors of the French Revolution, patriarchy, social justice, and slavery, he writes.
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Music Writing Set to Music: Genius
Christopher R. Weingarten's long Spin essay about Lana Del Rey, Cults, and "a multitude of mostly female-led indie heartachers" is one of the best things you'll read this week. It's also, as a matter of fact, one of the best multimedia integrations of Spotify I've seen in a while. More of this, please.
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“A hustler wrote this?”
“The book documents its time, a time when homosexuality was illegal, and still described in medical books as a mental illness. It is one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to be gay in the mid-20th century — ostracized — separate from the mainstream world. It reveals, through its characters, how young men couldn't admit, even to themselves, that they were what society deemed perverted.” On the novel City of Night by John Rechy.
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Stranger Than Fiction
This essay from Adrian Barnes at The Daily Beast on cancer and fiction and how the two mirror one another is eerie and fascinating. This review of Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby from The Millions addresses this tendency of writing and real world illnesses to feed of of one another.
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New York: It Isn’t All That
Roxane Gay rounded up some of her favorite writers from “Outside of New York City.” (And she's not talking about Brooklyn.)
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This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. The assumption that one can only admire or empathize with characters in fiction (or people in life) if they are the same gender and race as ones self is ridiculous and counter-productive. It should be the thoughts and the behaviors of characters that matters. Emphasizing a character’s color as the source of their importance and depth is superficial and divisive.
Well said, morty. You shouldn’t need to pat yourself on the back while telling everyone that you’re writing characters who are a different gender or race than you. That idea misses the entire point.