“Though female authors write experimental novels about women—like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?—the avant-garde has long been associated with male authors and stories. That association made Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine seem doubly unusual.” On Kleeman’s debut novel and blatantly feminine themes in the avant-garde.
Pynchon Possessed by the Spirit of a Teenaged Girl
Writing Heartbreak
Learn more about Hans Christian Andersen Award winner Cao Wenxuan. “China has given us so many heartbreaking stories. How can you avoid writing about them? I can’t sacrifice my life experience in order to make children happy.” Pair with Edan Lepucki’s piece on the grown-up counterparts to children’s stories.
Inside the Hive-Mind of the Class of 2013
For the Class of 2013, salsa has always outsold ketchup. For these and other wry conjectures, see the latest edition Beloit College’s annual “Mindset List.” (N.B.: For the class of 2013, “mindset” is not a clunky neologism.)
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Beholden Like Us
It may comfort you to know that Susan Orlean claims to have “a sad dependence” on her iPhone. The New Yorker staff writer, who published an article (paywall) on the Twitter account Horse_ebooks this week, tells Bobby Finger that she had to buy a new battery case because she ran through the charge on her phone by the middle of the day.
A rare thing, the antiquarian
The New York Times recently ran an in depth look at the process of learning to deal in rare books. Which made me think of The Monkey’s Paw, a rare book store so good that twice now I’ve personally heard rare book dealers (at both Sellers and Newel and Paper Books) describe, with admiration and a dash of collegial envy, as everyone’s favorite book store.
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A First for the Odyssey
The New York Times Magazine profiles Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Her translation is one of our most eagerly anticipated for November. “One way of talking about Wilson’s translation of the “Odyssey” is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, ‘correct.'”