Over at Slate, Pamela Erens explores how descriptions of childbirth have disappeared from contemporary novels. Also check out Claire Cameron’s Millions interview with the author and Martha Anne Toll’s review of Erens’s new novel, Eleven Hours.
What Labor Is
He Means Well
The “good bad guy” has been having his moment on television. From Don Draper to Tony Soprano, America loves the anti-hero. Here’s a look at some literary anti-heroes from over at Ploughshares. You are likely to either agree with or be enraged by this essay from The Millions on likeability in fiction.
Good Gugge-mugga!
Congratulations to the new group of Guggenheim Fellows in fiction and nonfiction, which, in addition to such luminaries as Kiran Desai and Colson Whitehead, includes past Millions contributors J.C. Hallman, Terese Svoboda, and Ben Marcus.
Sci-Fi and Colonialism
The Atlantic discusses the link between science fiction and colonialism. “The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think.”
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RIP Mall Bookstores
Mourning the death of the Waldenbooks at the mall. “But in a way I’m glad, as this means that yet another supposed agent of publishing’s ever-imminent death is now biting the dust itself.”
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Print Magazine Goes Digital
The fall issue of Washington Square Review is now available online, featuring new work by Morgan Parker, Ron Padgett, Mariama Lockington, and interviews with Year in Reading alumnus Nick Flynn, Jenny Offill, Jericho Brown, and Henri Cole. Pair with this Millions profile of Flynn.
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Paris, I love you
There’s an excerpt of Rosecrans Baldwin’s new memoir in GQ. Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down comes out next week!