Louis Menand writes about why the women’s movement needed The Feminine Mystique (despite its shortcomings). You could also read a review of Rebecca Jo Plant’s Mom, which looks to The Feminine Mystique to understand why our culture blames mothers.
Critical Texts
Some (Possibly Stale) Links
William T. Vollmann has a new book out, Riding Toward Everywhere about riding freight trains. In what must be a first for Vollmann, the Washington Post describes the book as a “modest little volume.”The New Yorker held a contest to reinterpret Eustace Tilley, its “iconic dandy.” The entries are posted on Flickr.The anxiety brought on by selling books to the used bookstore.The Atlantic website goes free. Everything back to 1995 is available.n+1 interviews a hedge fund manager. It’s surprisingly fascinating (if you skim the technical stuff).Also in the world of big money, a record was broken on Monday. As global markets plummeted, French bank Societe Generale was selling frantically. The bank had just discovered that an employee had fraudulently lost $7.2 billion, believed to be the most ever by a “rogue trader.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Edugyan, D’Agata, Manguso, Ullman, Herbert, Shadid, Baseball
Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is now out in the U.S. Also new this week are John D’Agata’s much-discussed Lifespan of a Fact, Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, Ellen Ullman’s By Blood and The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert, who has an essay up on our site today. The new memoir by Anthony Shadid has seen its release date pushed up to this week. See our remembrance of Shadid. Finally, it’s Christmas for baseball fans: the 2012 Baseball Prospectus is out.
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Recommended Reading from Roxane Gay
Book Riot has compiled a list of Roxane Gay’s recommended reads via Twitter. Some of her choices include Citizen by Claudia Rankine, God Help the Child by Toni Morrison, and City on Fire by our own Garth Risk Hallberg. See more books Gay recommends in our Year in Reading column.
Postcard Lit
In the latest issue of Bookslut, Madeline Monson-Rosen takes a look at A Card from Angela Carter, a biography which tells the story of the writer’s life through her long correspondence with a friend.
Much Ado about Queneau
To commemorate publication of the 65th anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, New Directions has asked ten contemporary writers to “create new exercises in homage to Queneau.” Over at The Rumpus, you can check out Jonathan Lethem’s “Cyberpunk” exercise, as well as one of Queneau’s twenty eight “never before translated” exercises making its English debut in the new edition. Bonus: read our own Mark O’Connell on the “radical claims about the relationship between form and content” in Queneau’s writing.
David Simon to Adapt MLK Biography for HBO Miniseries
The Wire and Treme creator David Simon tells The Baltimore Sun that he’s going to work on an HBO miniseries about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The project will be based on Taylor Branch’s multi–part biographies of the civil rights leader.
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