“Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” On Emily Dickinson’s self-creation at Lit Hub. Pair with a piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of Dickinson’s poems.
Dickinson’s Self-Creation
NBA Nominee Hits Shelves
Another new release this week: Jaimy Gordon’s book Lord of Misrule, a small press underdog recently nominated for the National Book Award.
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The Novel Doppelganger
Are you familiar with the concept of the novel doppelgänger? If not you should read this advice column, especially if you’re an aspiring author. What are the odds??
“Aftermath and Armageddon”
“There is something terrifying but also fascinating about contemplating the end of humanity,” and on Oct. 25th our own Edan Lepucki and Emily St. John Mandel (whose novel Station Eleven was just shortlisted for the National Book Award) will be discussing their recent apocalyptic fictions at the Texas Book Festival.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Congratulations to Millions contributor Edan Lepucki who received the 2009 James D. Phelan Award for her novel manuscript, Days of Insignificance and Evil. The award is given by the Intersection for the Arts and sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation. She’ll be reading, along with Page McBee and Youmna Chlala, at the Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco on Monday, November 16th at 7:30.
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Bound
“Think the kennel partner was a man? Think he was, in Braverman’s telling, threatened by her success? You are correct. There are so many stories like this, in Double Bind, of ambition built up and then put in its place: the high school classmate who sneered to Roxane Gay, when he learned that she’d been accepted to Yale when he had not, ‘affirmative action.'”
The End of the Gala Era
Peter Osnos on how far the publishing industry has come since the galas and publishing events of the 1990s: “That the action in publishing now is in the creation of books rather than selling the rights to them is a meaningful indicator of the excitement in the industry about the digital potential.”
To read or NA to read
“You should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children,” Ruth Graham wrote in Slate last week, stirring the proverbial pot of new adult fans of Young Adult bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park. A host of YA-defenders rose up to shout her down. “You should never be embarrassed by any book you enjoy,” Hillary Kelly responds in The New Republic, unrealistically (we’re embarrassed by quite a lot). For the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg cites examples of worthwhile, complex YA fiction we can certainly support: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Pushcart War, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Westing Game.
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