“Their deliberately childless life, their cat, Converse (named not for the shoe but for the political scientist), their free-range beef and nights and weekends of reading and grading and high-quality television series—it was fine and a little horrible. She gets it.” It shouldn’t take much convincing to get you to go and read some new fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld, Gender Studies, over at The New Yorker.
I’m Not Sexist
Here’s Johnny!
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Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt's textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, "I sighed." We're sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
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Poets Ride Free
One Siberian city is offering free subway rides to passengers who can recite “at least two verses from any poem by Alexander Pushkin.” The obvious corollary would be NJ Transit providing free service to passengers capable of singing “Born to Run” in its entirety.
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Literary Cartographies
“Everyone was compared to García Márquez or Fuentes once upon a time. Now it’s Bolaño or Vila-Matas (best case scenario). I am not sure what the reason for this is. There are many possible explanations. One may be that Latin America is still conceived by many as a kind of remote, torrid zone, an isolated and disconnected region of the world. So the only possible references associated with younger writers are the better-known older ones, always writing within the same language." Over at The White Review, Stephen Sparks interviews Valeria Luiselli about Latin American criticism and borrowing from the past. Also check out Lily Meyer’s Millions review of Luiselli’s new novel, The Story of My Teeth.
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Their Thanksgiving(s)
"Behind the collective feast and public ritual lies a personal dimension: the holiday as each of us has lived it, laughed about it, imagined it or reinvented it." For their "My Thanksgiving" feature, The New York Times asked nine writers — including Parul Sehgal, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Emma Cline — how they celebrate the holiday. Pair with Nguyen's 2015 Year in Reading.
Rosenbaum on Nabokov’s Laura
Slate's Ron Rosenbaum talks with Brooke Gladstone of NPRs On the Media about posthumous publishing, specifically Nabokov, but also Kafka and in general.
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