As part of their Literary Ladies Cage Fight series, The Butter pitted two of Shakespeare’s most well-known characters against each other, staging contests between Hamlet’s Ophelia and Romeo and Juliet’s Juliet. Who won, you ask? Only one way to find out. You could also read Stefanie Peters on women and Shakespeare’s plays.
Tragedians
Mania for Classification
Our own Emily St. John Mandel is in conversation with Laura van den Berg over at the FSG blog. “We have such a mania for classification, don’t we? Everything just seems so black-or-white, one-or-zero, genre-or-literary sometimes, and I don’t think those divisions are especially helpful.” The authors are Year in Reading alumni, and you can check out Mandel’s and van den Berg’s posts at the respective links.
Similar-Sounding Names: A Conundrum
For The Atlantic, Nina Martyris examines books that are rife with characters with similar-sounding names, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina.
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Roger Angell has worked at the New Yorker for 58 years.
In his profile of Roger Angell, Sridhar Paddu offers this astute observation from Charles McGrath: “Which is the greater—Roger the writer or Roger the editor? It’s kind of a toss-up.” Bonus: Angell’s piece about Don Zimmer, who just passed away this week, is well worth your time.
New Edith Wharton Discovered
A new short story by Edith Wharton has been discovered in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The nine-page story, “The Field of Honour,” takes place in 1915. We reflect on Wharton’s work.
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