“For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she’s got to be a walker – someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind façades, penetrating into secret courtyards. Virginia Woolf called it ‘street haunting’ in an essay by that name: sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the ‘champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets,’ we leave the things that define us at home, and become ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.’” On the female flâneur. Also check out this Millions essay about the flâneur in modern fiction.
The Women Who Reclaimed the Streets
Julie Powell at Powell’s
The Julie Powell interview at Powell’s — on butchery and infidelity and self-disclosure.
Everyone Is a Writer
“People in the publishing industry were complaining that ‘everyone is a writer now.’ I thought, well, why fight that? Isn’t that a good thing?” Andy Hunter, Publisher & COO of Catapult, Publisher of Literary Hub, and Co-Founding Chairman of Electric Literature, talks about the impetus for his three ventures.
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Only Connect
Recommended Reading: Anything that Vivian Gornick writes. Here’s an essay from The New York Times on how literature ages and rereading E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Our own Lydia Keisling also wrote a fantastic piece on the Forster classic.
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This Side of Criticism
F. Scott Fitzgerald called himself “a moralist at heart,” which might be why Kathryn Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent.”
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Postcards You Wish You Could Send
This week in book-inspired graphics, of the beautiful-but-not-necessarily-informational type: A series of postcards from fictional places.
Love and Death in Miami
The Takeaway hosted two ambitious author panels at last month’s Miami Book Fair International. The first panel covered “love,” and featured Millions contributor Christopher Beha alongside Jami Attenberg and three others. The second panel focused on “death,” and it featured writers and literary figures as well as Benjamin Busch, an Iraq War veteran.
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Writerly Obligations
Do writers owe their readers engagement on social media? “Our sole obligation to readers is to write the best books that we possibly can,” our own Emily St. John Mandel told The Guardian. Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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A Swiftly Tilting Biography
“The contradictions of [Madeleine] L’Engle’s life offer the best insights into the complicated acrobatics we perform in the modern world in order to satisfy the competing claims of love, family, success, and ambition….While the person that emerges could be tiresome, didactic, and just plain weird—why is everyone always breaking into a hymn at her house?—she could also be tender and offered real insights into the difficulties of growing up.” There’s a new biography of the A Wrinkle In Time author out, and The New Republic examines her life’s many complexities and, well, wrinkles.
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