“I don’t know what wave feminism we are in now. Fourth? Fifth? But Ms. Attenberg, it depresses me to no end that the gritty, credible, less kissed-by-God heroine of your book, Andrea Bern, a single, childless, 39-year-old straight woman, a character created almost 50 years after Mary Richards, is still realistically struggling with and defying convention because she isn’t married.” On Jami Attenberg’s new novel.
A Fatal Continuity
Oldest-Ever Quran Unearthed
A Yemeni man claims to have unearthed the oldest copy of the Quran in the world. An inscription engraved on the manuscript’s first page indicates that it dates back to 815 AD.
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RIP Culture
Recommended Reading: Laura Miller on Mario Vargas Llosa and cultural declinism.
Sizzling
When did romance novels get such a bad rep? They weren’t always derided as somehow lesser than other books. At Jezebel, Kelly Faircloth delves into the history of the modern romance novel, exploring how particular stereotypes latched on to the popular genre. You could also read Julia Fierro on sex and the literary writer.
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Rewarding Attention
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova meditates on attention and the works of Simone Weil, among them Gravity and Grace. Popova writes that Weil “wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.”