Is your family concerned about you? Are all your Victorian relatives vaguely scandalized by your presence? Then you just might be in a character in an Oscar Wilde play. At The Toast, a list of ways to tell.
Being Ernest
Cheryl Strayed Discovers Her Long Lost Sister
NPR caught up with Wild author Cheryl Strayed to talk about a stranger who had a particularly personal connection with the writer’s book. As it turns out, she was Strayed’s half-sister. (Bonus: we interviewed Strayed for our site last year.)
Reading about Reading
Recommended Reading: Clare Beams writes for Ploughshares about the effect of reading a story in which someone reads a story.
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An Old Story
"We aim to foster a review culture where all genders can write about all topics and be met with equitable coverage." Launched last year by a group of McGill University students, Just Review is an advocacy project that aims to help publications combat gender bias in the literary and publishing worlds. Would that this weren't such an evergreen subject.
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Electric Literature’s Latest Project
Electric Literature just launched a new experiment with Israeli writer Alex Epstein. Epstein published his latest collection of "micro-fiction" for free on Facebook, and he wrote about the experiment on the Electric Literature blog. For the next week, Electric Literature will be publishing a sample of translations from his collection on their Facebook page.
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Decadence and Poetry
"To say that late Victorian poetry is bleak would be akin to remarking that Wilkie Collins had a decent knack for plotting a novel. These poems are freighted with Gothic overtones, and it is not uncommon for some supernatural phenomenon to intrude upon what had started out as a seemingly harmless quatrain. We often encounter Death himself—or the Devil—who is something of a literary celebrity for the decadent poets. But what marks the best of these poems is that the outré is in service to something that we can think of as more desperate, and, wouldn’t you know, human." Over at The Boston Review, an online-only essay looking at the peculiarities of Victorian decadent poetry.
Who You Gonna Call?
After the death of Harold Ramis, it seems only fitting to read Esquire's oral history of Ghostbusters. Dan Aykroyd initially wanted it to be an intergalactic drama, yet he and others were happy with how it turned out. "People in the paranormal field loved it. It gave focus to their work," Aykroyd said.
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Newt’s Civil War Book
Newt Gingrich's recent rise in Republican primary polls has occurred in tandem with the release of his historical novel set in the Civil War. The result? Gingrich writes a notorious massacre out of his book, The Battle of the Crater.
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