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
Appearing Elsewhere
The spiffy new Los Angeles Review of Books website has posted my review of Ben Fountain’s new novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
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Must be all that Schadenfreude
Eating your manuscript, deliberately slicing open your own head during a reading, titling your work “Baby Fucker.” These stunts are par for the course during the competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a prestigious German literary award.
Berlin Stories, Redux
“Home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain.” Stop what you’re doing and go read this interview with Darryl Pinckney, author of Black Deutschland, over at The Rumpus. Here’s a great Millions essay on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which serves as a sort of (misguided) guide map for the protagonist of Black Deutschland.
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Curiosities: 8x Buffalo
Appearing Elsewhere: VQR Young Reviewers Contest winner and Millions contributor Emily drops by the NBCC blog to tell them what she’s been reading.The NY Times fleshes out some of the details of Google’s digitizing agreement with publishers and authors, including getting into some of the numbers involved. We explained the importance of the deal last year.At Jacket Copy Carolyn Kellogg gets Sarah Weinman to discuss the secrets behind her incredible speed-reading ability. (462 books in 2008!)Carolyn also recently highlighted all the great literary magazines that supplied the featured stories in last year’s “best of” fiction anthologies, as well as the runners up.80 years after the last one, a new Winnie the Pooh book is on its way.A timely and topical list: the Top 10 green books of 2008For the multi-tasker (or perhaps the really lazy): the book holder bracelet.”Had I an atheist friend who asked, ‘Can you tell me please what this religion business is all about, not as some metaphysical hypothesis or historical phenomenon, but what it really means to be religious?’ I might hand him or her a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. ‘Read this,’ I’d say, ‘and it will give you a pretty good idea.'”For sports fans: Bill James on why statisticians should boycott the BCS.That perilous question: why blog?Vice did a fiction issue.David Brooks discusses some of the best long-form journalism of 2008 (with links!)The outgoing president’s surprising reading list.The Hype Machine’s impressive top albums of 2008 project.Wikipedia find of the week: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffaloA consideration of poet Jack Spicer.With apologies to William Carlos Williams, A poem for Blago.New short fiction from Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness (via Scott)Jonathan Franzen on the Social Novel (via OUP blog)
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Investigated Havana
In the most recent New York Magazine, Conner Gorry takes a look some of the economic transitions affecting Havana, Cuba. Meanwhile, for Guernica, Julia Cooke delves into the city’s epicurean black market.
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Dear Mr. Watterson Gets a Trailer
A few months back, I wrote about Dear Mr. Watterson, which at the time was set to premiere at Cleveland’s International Film Festival. Well, fans of Calvin and Hobbes will be happy to learn that the Bill Watterson documentary has just released its first teaser trailer. Look for the flick to hit theaters this November.
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Reading The Power in 2017
Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. “In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men.” Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it’s due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. ‘It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.’ But she adds: ‘I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'”