Yesterday, one of my Curiosities included a link to an old Millions review of AM Homes’s domestically disturbing novel May We Be Forgiven. Today, she has a great new story over at The Guardian just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Be Mine
For the Squares
“To use the lingo of their era, these novels are square. The protagonists have names like Jane and Barbara; they are not the misfits of which much teen literature is made but instead fundamentally good girls who long to fit in, and usually do … Viewed through the lens of contemporary culture, and especially contemporary teen lit, these girls should be boring and shallow. But Beverly Cleary’s supposedly ordinary girls are complex: resentful of their mothers one moment and sympathetic toward them the next, willing to do anything for one special boy but indignant when they’re taken for granted.” On the unexpectedly complex nature of Beverly Cleary’s boring protagonists with Ruth Graham at Slate.
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
William Blake may have described its “green and pleasant land” but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
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Bourdain’s “Gourmet Slaughterfest” Graphic Novel
Guardian reports that Anthony Bourdain is writing a new “gourmet slaughterfest” graphic novel about “ultraviolent food nerds,” intended to be “a cross between Eat Drink Man Woman and A Fistful of Dollars.”
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How To: Invent a Language
Think your novel could use a language of its own, but don’t have the philological powers of Tolkien? Then take a few lessons from Game of Throne‘s resident linguist, David J. Peterson, who turned George R.R. Martin‘s 55 Dothraki names into a 4,000 word vocabulary with a working grammar.
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Kingsolver Wins the Orange
In a reprise of this year’s Rooster final, Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna comes out on top this time, besting Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and four other finalists) for the Orange Prize.
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