“For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities. For if one language could be certain of a table’s gender and another couldn’t be bothered, then what was true of the world was intimately tied, not to some platonic ideal, but to our way of expressing it.” Ana Menéndez on being a multilingual writer in the twenty-first century.
The Language of the Present
The Art of the Recommendation
Laura Miller at Salon reports on the fine art of recommending books – “too delicate a task to leave to e-commerce robots” – and the literary types who are now stepping in to offer their advice.
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Rare Manuscripts on Trial
A few rare stolen manuscripts from the New York Public Library have been the subject of a court case. Melville House covers the progression of the case so far. Travis McDade writes about rare book crime capers in the recent past for The Millions.
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The Rise of the “Lit’ry Lady”
Tina Jordan unearths a 1907 Times article observing the phenomenon of the "lit'ry lady," a group of women taking over the bestseller lists for the first time.
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Writing Like a Reader
Over at Catapult, Lynn Steger Strong writes on writing a novel that readers will read. As she puts it, “I was trying to explore the specific experience of living in the world while also living largely, sometimes to one’s own detriment, inside of books, inside one’s head.” Also check out this Millions piece, featuring six writers looking back on their first novels.
“Wounded Women”
“I am worried about the implications of throwing the label ‘women’s pain’ around individual experiences of suffering, and I am even more uncomfortable with women who feel free to speak for all women. I worry about making pain a ticket to gain entry into the women’s club. And I worry that the assumption of vulnerability threatens to invigorate just the sexist evils it aims to combat by demanding that men serve as shields against it.” In an essay for the Boston Review, Jessa Crispin shares her concerns about the “wounded women” trend in literature right now, citing Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams and Roxane Gay‘s Bad Feminist as well the Twitter campaign #yesallwomen as particular examples. Pair with Ryan Teitman‘s Millions review of The Empathy Exams.
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Talking Seveneves
Recommended listening: David Naimon talks with Neal Stephenson about his new novel, Seveneves. Pair with Chris Barsanti‘s Millions review.
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“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory and considers “the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order.” Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg‘s piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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