Buzzfeed interviews Naomi Alderman author of The Power, a 2016 book receiving heightened attention this year for its timely feminist premise. “In the book, women develop the ability to electrocute people at will, and as the dynamic between the genders shifts after centuries of oppression, women (finally) begin to take control back from men.” Why all the newfound attention? Alderman believes that it’s due to the subject matter and it being released in the States. ‘It’s only just been published in America and some American reviewers have responded to it as if it was written in response to Donald Trump, but in fact no, it was written before that. I think some of the things in the world have not changed and that is why you can mistake it for having been written yesterday.’ But she adds: ‘I think actually one thing that has really changed is that women are really fucking angry.'”
Reading The Power in 2017
John Berger, In Memoriam
The British critic, essayist, and novelist John Berger died yesterday at his home in France, reports The New York Times. Probably best known for his book of art-criticism-as-philosophy Ways of Seeing, which was turned into a popular BBC series and sold more than a million copies, Berger also won the Booker prize for G. in 1972 and was nominated again in 2008 for an epistolary novel, From A to X. The Guardian has rounded up some of his quotes, including the apt-feeling “[h]ope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”
Let’s Write About Sex, Baby!
Authors, are you struggling to get your book’s characters together? Are they lacking a little spark, a little intimacy? Well, have no fear. The folks at Open Road Media put together a video with Erica Jong, Lawrence Block, Patricia Gaffney, and a few more authors on The Art of Writing Sex Scenes. This should do the trick.
Us vs. Them
When The New York Times tried to ask Jhumpa Lahiri what immigrant fiction inspired her, she smacked the question down by saying there is no such thing as immigrant fiction. “If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.”
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Gun Fight at the O.K. Bookstore
Stick ’em up, partner! In a confusing marriage of literature and implicit violence, a bookstore in Austin, Texas is offering a ten percent discount to any customers openly carrying a handgun in their establishment.
Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
Try, Try Again
Millions contributor Jessica Francis Kane gives an account of the first time she had a story accepted into a literary magazine. Kane’s short story collection, This Close, hit shelves last March.
On my to-read list. At the moment I am reading The Beauty Mith
Wouldn’t electrocuting people to death be murder, i.e., illegal, and so how would them having this power be any different from the real world as it exists today? I’ve never shot anybody but I have fired some guns and it’s not especially hard, and I’ve seen women do it, so it would seem women already have the ability to kill people by shooting them (or by poisoning them or running them over with cars–there’re many way to kill people). Is there some special dispensation for killing people by electricity that permits women to do so in the world of this book without legal repercussions? Because otherwise it wouldn’t differ from the common reality that we all know.