“Kindness cuts through the rest. And it’s a reminder for us all to reach out. Write that sweet note. Make that loving phone call. Because you never know what will stick.” Here is the follow-up to Julienne Grey’s fantastic New York Times piece “My Mother is Not a Bird,” courtesy of Electric Literature.
Kindness Cuts Through
Ich Ni San Chi Go!
Recommended Reading: “Supernova” by Dani Shapiro, who was just interviewed for our site this past week.
Reading The Power in 2017
Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. "In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men." Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it's due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. 'It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.' But she adds: 'I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'"
Pulling an Updike
Authors are known to mine material from their personal relationships for their writing, but John Updike found inspiration from his interviews. After journalist William Ecenbarger wrote a profile of Updike in 1983, he found himself the subject of an Updike short story. Pair with: Our review of Updike's Collected Stories.
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2010: The Year of the Literary Dystopia?
Our own Emily Mandel may have been onto something with her "catastrophic" summer reading list; dystopia seems to be all the rage this summer. The WSJ sets Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death in "a dystopian United States that is halfway between Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano and Woody Allen's Sleeper." The SF Chron calls Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story "literature's first dystopian epistolary romantic satire." And later this year, as we noted this month, will be Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez, which focuses on a cultish community in the dystopian aftermath of a flu pandemic.