Lindsey Drager considers the novella and argues that it is neither a feminine form nor a smaller type of novel. As she puts it, “while other fiction aims outward, the novella curls in, coiling around itself until there’s no distinction between the story’s body and the story’s shell.” Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone’s essay on the art of the novella.
This Is Not a Novel
Brad Pitt for Mayor of New Orleans
Brad Pitt for Mayor of New Orleans? Well, why not? Maybe he’s earned a shot at it.
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“Tea without milk is so uncivilized.”
British Flight Lieutenant Alex Cassie, memorably portrayed by Donald Pleasence in one of my all-time favorite films, The Great Escape, passed away last week at the age of 95.
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Family Tree
“Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself…many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her father for his biographer, but who was Leslie Stephen, exactly?
Uncovering Amazon
Book publishers will tell you how many titles they are publishing this fall. Apple at least reveals how many iPads it sells. But Amazon is taking a different tack, shrouding much of the plans for its publishing venture in secrecy.
Barry Hannah, 1942-2010
Barry Hannah, the mind-blowing author of Airships and many other books, died Monday at age 67.
Best Friends
“Three weeks before she died on July 25, 2012, Marcia (Marty) Brown Stern ’54 sent me a registered letter, which began, ‘What is enclosed may astonish you.’ Indeed it did. The envelope included a draft of ‘marcia,’ an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951.”