The National Book Critics Circle has announced its inaugural class of Emerging Critics, including our own Ismail Muhammad! Read his first piece for us, “Frank Ocean and the Black Male Body,” here.
Emergent Criticism
Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism
“Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper,” writes Heather Havrilesky in the latest issue of The Baffler. Throughout the piece, Havrilesky explores the way luxury brand fetishism and conspicuous consumption fueled E.L. James’s “female-friendly” pornography phenomenon
“Post-Skynyrd”
Recommended Reading: Bronwen Dickey on Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country.
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In Transit
Over at Guernica, Liza St. James interviews Adam Z. Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy, the founders of the independent press Transit Books. As they put it, “We were noticing this kind of partition between two types of readerships: those who read domestic literature and those who read translation. […] We were interested in the separation of those literary spheres, and began to wonder how to bridge the gap between them.”
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E-Books Get Pricey
As e-book sales increase, their prices have inched upward. But will customers pay $10 to $15 for a digital book? Will you?
Billy Pilgrim Is Unstuck
“How can a horrific event, so monstrous it seems incomprehensible, be told? How does one even find the words to write about it?” For The Paris Review, Matteo Pericoli takes a look at Slaughterhouse-Five and the bridge between fiction and architecture.
Pre-Speed
Once upon a time, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a very proto-Speedboat kind of novel. It’s only just getting published now.
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