Recommended Reading: Leah Falk looks at women’s writing and unpaid labor.
What Work Is
What’s Frightening About Gone Girl
Don’t Cry author Mary Gaitskill reviews Gillian Flynn’s wildly successful thriller, Gone Girl, for the pages of Bookforum. What she finds is that the book isn’t really frightening because of its plot per se, but rather because its two main characters “do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of extreme artifice, and it’s exactly that extreme artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening.” For what it’s worth, Edan Lepucki, Michael Bourne, Ed Park, Janet Potter, and Jennifer duBois each named Flynn’s book in their most recent Year in Reading pieces.
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Populist Poetics
“What happens when everyone’s a poet?” asked Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review. Now, Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula debate what that popularity might actually mean for contemporary poetry.
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The Miami Book Fair International sets its lineup
The Miami Book Fair International has released its full, 300-strong lineup for the 2012 festivities. It should surprise nobody that Tom Wolfe is one of the headliners, but the full, alphabetized list of the other attending authors can be read here.
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More Anticipated Books
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito spots fall publication dates for volumes I and II of Murakami‘s IQ84…and for Helen DeWitt‘s new novel (!), Lightning Rods, due out from New Directions.
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I Turn My Camera On
When does photojournalism become exploitive? At Granta, a podcast examining the ethics of photojournalism.
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Who Should Readers Root For In The Super Bowl?
Need a team to root for during today’s Super Bowl? Might I suggest cheering on the team that represents a city angling to become America’s second UNESCO City of Literature? (Related: A few months back, Krakow, Poland, became the seventh city to join the UNESCO bunch.)