“I am very fortunate to be involved in a number of supportive communities who rally when things like this happen – but rarely do I laugh quite as hard as I did when reading Avid Reader’s responses.” The Guardian has the uplifting story of how an independent Australian bookstore “took on anti-feminist trolls and won.” If for some reason, after reading that, you want to wade into an equally polarized comments section, scroll down to the conversation following Daniel Jose Ruiz‘s recent piece on geekdom and race.
Suck It, MRAs
First Steps
Can a book prepare you for motherhood? A reader asks this question in the Match Book column in the Times.
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Martians Among Us
Everybody knows the saying, “men are from Mars; women are from Venus.” Well, some scientists now believe we might all be from Mars. (Sorry, Venus.)
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Submergence Coming to a Theater Soon?
U.S. film producers have acquired the movie option rights for J. M Ledgard’s Submergence, a book Kathryn Schulz called a “strange, intelligent, gorgeously written book” – among the best she read all of last year.
The Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County
All of Faulkner’s characters exist in the same county, so they probably ran into each other. What if there were a Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County? Nathan Pensky humorously imagines the feuds between As I Lay Dying’s Addie Bundren and the protagonist of “A Rose for Emily” among others at McSweeney’s.
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Self-Absorption
A few days ago, our own Kaulie Lewis pointed readers to a LARB essay about Geoff Dyer, which nicely complemented a piece about the author our own Mark O’Connell wrote for Slate back in June. Now, at Full-Stop, David Burr Gerard suggests that Dyer’s strengths, which worked so well in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, may have hampered him in Another Great Day at Sea. FYI, our own Janet Potter reviewed the latter book for The Millions.
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Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
No Rest for Rowling
Flavorwire reports that J.K. Rowling is working on two new novels, one under her own name and one under her crime writing pen name, Robert Galbraith. See also: that time Elizabeth Minkel had extremely strong feelings about Rowling’s internet activity.