Year in Reading alumna Terry McMillan discusses “why she chooses to focus on Black women, her writing process, her latest book I Almost Forgot About You, and how Black women are treated in the publishing world” at Black Media Minute.
Remembering You
Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz
Experience “THE POWER OF BOOKS“You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you’re not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these “Captchas” to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you’re not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.I missed Junot Diaz’s appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.
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Nikki Giovanni on Daydreams and Owning Yourself
The 77-year-old poet discusses politics, evening rituals, Cleopatra the dog, and her new writing collection.
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Conferenceness
“Can a conference really transcend its essential conferenceness?” For a conference on Geoff Dyer, that’s the essential question, and the Los Angeles Review of Books has an answer. Pair with Dyer’s Year in Reading and Janet Potter‘s review of Another Great Day at Sea.
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Pulp and Not
Is “literary” fiction just a product of clever marketing? Elizabeth Edmondson thinks it is. At The Guardian, she argues that classically literary authors like Jane Austen had no idea they were writing Literature — posterity classified their work as such later on. Her essay dovetails nicely with our own Edan Lepucki’s argument that literature is a genre.
Tuesday New Release Day: Frangello; Theroux; Alameddine; Antopol; Minor; Schaffert
New this week: A Life in Men by Gina Frangello; Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux; An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine; The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol; Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor; and The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert.
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James Tate in Hypertext
This week in book-related infographics: a hypertext tribute to the late poet James Tate, organized by Electric Literature and featuring “personal memories of Tate, commentary about his work, and recordings of some of his most meaningful poems.”
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Brilliant Friends
“There has been a growth in the literary depiction of a particular type of friendship, one that has in the past found itself vulnerable to dilution and deflection by the ostensibly more powerful imperatives of heterosexuality and motherhood.” On literary female friendships, from Virginia Woolf to Elena Ferrante and Year in Reading alumna Zadie Smith.