Did you join Emma Watson’s feminist book club? Katy Waldman did, and she has some thoughts on the Shared Shelf. We have our own feminist hate-read book club with Nicole Cliffe, Michelle Dean, Roxane Gay, and more.
Sharing the Shelf
A Literary Thriller
Ahead of next week’s publication of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the battle over Stieg Larsson’s lucrative literary estate. (Thanks, Craig)
The Klingon Word for Spoon is “baghneQ”
Lapham’s Quarterly has a new podcast about “the weird world of invented languages” such as Klingon, Dothraki, and Esperanto.
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Countdown to Our Year in Reading Series
We are only a few days away from our annual 2010 Year in Reading series! Over the past couple of months, we’ve asked dozens of readers, writers, and thinkers to tell us about the best book they read all year. On December 1st, we’ll begin posting pieces from some of the biggest names in literature and publishing. Look for more announcements on the site and twitter over the next few weeks. While you wait, check out last year’s Year in Reading series to get in the spirit!
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Why Are Writers Paid So Little, and Programmers Paid So Much?
“And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’”
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“In a communal dressing room”
“Long before feminism made fashion a guilty pleasure, my first experience of the sisterhood among strangers took place in a communal dressing room.” Judith Thurman writes for The New Yorker about Women in Clothes and her experiences in thrift stores and clothing swaps. For more about the connections between feminism, dressing and literature, check out Rachel Signer‘s Millions review of the same anthology.
Press Start
Readers of the 1960s and 70s ran into many people who worried that writers were learning from television. In 2015, the concern is slightly different — are writers taking cues from video games? At the Ploughshares blog, Matthew Burnside tackles the game-ification of books.
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Violence and Darkness for Children
In a New York Times op-ed piece on violence in children’s literature, Maria Tatar claims that “the savagery we offer children today is more unforgiving than it once was.” Is that really the case? Adam Gidwitz‘s A Tale Dark And Grimm (reviewed by the Times last November), which underscores the violence inherent in Grimm’s tales, can be read as a counterpoint.
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