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
The Teen Whisperer
"When John Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, 'But it’s your plot, John!'—which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship." Green, author of YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, is the literary hero of teenage girls, and nerdfighter hero to millions. After you read the excellent profile at The New Yorker, consider the The Millions' own review.
J.R.R. Tolkien Traced “Morse” to “Walrus”
Jonathan Dent offers a fascinating look at one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most challenging assignments for the Oxford English Dictionary. Apparently as a young philologist, Tolkien was tasked with tracing the etymology of “walrus” – a tricky word “of disputed origin that had all but entirely replaced the earlier English name morse since its first appearance in English in the late 1600s.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman; House; Gaffney; Montefiore; Tanweer; Leslie-Hynan; Brooks; Gordon; Livings; Schottenfeld; Kennedy; Bertino; Gay
Out this week: The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman; The Kills by Richard House; When the World Was Young by Elizabeth Gaffney; Secrets of the Lighthouse by Santa Montefiore; The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer; Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan; Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks; The Liar’s Wife by Mary Gordon; The Dog by Jack Livings; Bluff City Pawn by Stephen Schottenfeld; Beneath the Neon Egg by Thomas E. Kennedy; 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino; and Bad Feminist by Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay, who also came out with a novel a few months ago.
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STEM for Dogs
Even dogs are learning STEM now. Check out this rigorous program from Rollover Academy at McSweeney’s.
Hatchet Job
Cutting out large chunks of a book is pretty common, but cutting out 200 pages is a little unusual. While working on his latest novel, Joshua Ferris decided to abandon the elements drawn from crime fiction, which meant he had to toss out a huge portion of his draft. “Now that was a fun day,” he says.
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That Title Alone Deserves A Groan
A decade in the making, Val Kilmer's one-man play about Mark Twain, Citizen Twain, will finally open this weekend. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the actor (at a cemetery?) to talk about "his career and the landscape of America."
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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.