For The New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about girls in titles lately—Emma Cline’s The Girls, Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls, and Amy Schumer’s The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, to name a few. Pair with Michael Bourne’s Millions review of The Girls.
Girlhood
For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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Mutual Self-Interest in Bad Decline
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, America needs George Saunders. Fortunately, the editors at The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs blog appear to understand this.
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Trigger Warning: Literature
Students at the University of California Santa Barbara, Rutgers, Oberlin, and others have been requesting "trigger warning" labels on literature from The Great Gatsby to Huck Finn. In The Guardian, University College London Professor John Mullan snipes, "You might as well put a label on English literature saying: warning – bad stuff happens here."
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Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
"I couldn’t put the books down. Now that so many of us complain of diminished attention spans— our own as well as our companions’—it’s worth asking what has made millions of readers willing to suspend their disbelief—to suspend their selves—for thousands of pages." Why have so many people gone gaga for Ferrante and Knausgaard? We have our own theories as well.
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Wood on JJS
Critic and occasional Millions commenter James Wood has added his own two cents to the growing collection of Pulphead reviews.
What They Want
Among the raft of news stories that came out about Facebook recently, you may have missed the company’s quiet revolution in grammar, signified by its adoption of the much-debated singular “they.” If thinking about this change makes you queasy, just remember that singular “they” has been around since the days of Chaucer. (Related: Fiona Maazel on bad grammar.)
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Announced
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction have been announced! Winners for 2016 are Viet Thanh Nguyen for his novel, The Sympathizer and Sally Mann for Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. You could also read Nguyen’s Year in Reading.
Multi-Talented Nick Cave
You have to be a little in awe of the multi-disciplinary artist. Musician Nick Cave, who made his screenwriting debut with The Proposition, talks to the New Yorkerabout his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as the multi-media audio book version.