Lit Hub has created a Rotten Tomatoes for the literary world. Once a book receives three reviews, it is assigned a score on their new site, Book Marks. Alex Shephard asks if we might have a grade inflation problem.
High Book Marks
What’s “Appropriate”
We’ve been following the YA debate quite attentively – I wrote about it just last week – but Sarah Burnes‘s addition to the conversation, a blog post for The Paris Review, is one of the most eloquent I’ve read. In defense of reading YA fiction as a “grown-up” she writes, “The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self. I have not ceased to be the person I was when I was an adolescent; in fact, to think so seems to me like a kind of dissociation from a crucial aspect of one’s self. And the critic should be concerned with what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is not—not with what’s ‘appropriate.'”
YA Gay
Two American YA authors, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, were asked to “straighten” gay characters. Here is the rebuttal that followed.
Adam Novy Interview
Adam Novy, author of The Avian Gospels, is interviewed by Brad Listi for Other People. Their conversation topics include Chicago, Jewishness, Medusa, and “the fear of getting squashed by the universe.”
“There is no other planet like Earth, […] so Superfund sites have to be super fun.”
We’ve entered the Anthropocene. It’s time to read up: David Biello provides a list of required reading and a thesis on the goal of literature in this new geologic age.
National Literary Ambassadors in the New York Times
The New York Times interviews Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States for National Poetry Month. They discuss black history, bringing poetry to the central and rural parts of the country and to those who are incarcerated and why poetry isn’t as popular among adults. “Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry — and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.” It’s a delight, happy Saturday!
Picturing Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was one of the first people to use photography to control meaning. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American catalogues his many portraits and how they contributed to our perception of Douglass. Our own Edan Lepucki writes about the place of slave narratives in fiction.
Darcy the Ripper
As part of the Funny Women feature at The Rumpus, Melissa Darcey wonders: what would it be like if Lifetime made movies out of classic novels?