Recommended Reading: London’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted. Broadly spoke to some of the women who are taking to the streets to save the space.
Fighting for Space
Pig Tales
“I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate.” In the new issue of The Atlantic Weekly (not to be confused with the Monthly), a reprint of a classic E.B. White essay.
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Tuesday Means New Releases
Two hotly anticipate works by literary masters hit shelves this week. Both were “most anticipated books.” We have The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro. The latter was written about persuasively by Lydia in recent weeks.
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Blogging the Caine Prize
The first installment in a series of bloggers reading through the shortlist of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Aaron Bady looks at Rotimi Babutunde’s Bombay Republic [pdf]. A full list of participating bloggers is available at the bottom of Bady’s post.
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Conversations and Connections
Conversations and Connections is a Philadelphia conference offering editors, writers and publishers a chance to meet one another in a “comfortable, congenial environment.” The full day’s events are organized by Barrelhouse, and this year’s keynote speaker is The Odds author Stewart O’Nan.
Maurice Sendak at the Opera
Wallace Ludel explores the imaginative sets Maurice Sendak designed for a dozen operas and ballets, as well as the author's fascination with the stage.
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Teen Angst
In Meg Wolitzer’s new YA novel Belzhar, a group of teenagers packed off to an idyllic boarding school learn that they have the ability to undo their most serious traumas. Their discovery is sparked by a writing assignment in a class on Sylvia Plath. At Slate, Jennifer Ray Morell connects Wolitzer’s novel to Plath’s classic The Bell Jar. Related: our own Hannah Gersen’s interview with biographer Elizabeth Winder.
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Find the Long Word
Middlesex author and Pulitzer Prize winner (and Year in Reading alum) Jeffrey Eugenides has a new story out in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. Titled “Find the Bad Guy,” it may well be the first New Yorker story to show a character playing Words with Friends. Sample quote: “She had her arms around me, and we were rocking, real soft-like, the way Meg did after we gave her that kitten, before it died, I mean, when it was just a warm and cuddly thing instead of like it had hoof and mouth, and went south on us.”
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