“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Jamie Green writes for Buzzfeed about how romance novels have gotten more feminist over the years (and still getting a happily ever after) and people are now starting to sit up and take notice.
You’ve Been Sleeping on Romance Novels
Looking at Selma
“A film based on a historical subject, even a beautifully shot one, can remind us without meaning to that although reading in the US is a minority activity, the book is still the only medium in which you can make a complicated argument.” Darryl Pinckney writes about “Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma” for the New York Review of Books. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s Millions review of the film.
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Mary McCarthy’s Recycled Fiction
Perhaps best known for her fiction, specifically her classic The Group, Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by chance. “McCarthy was good at recycling – a term which she used herself – and good, also, as she admitted, at plagiarizing her own life. Nevertheless, her fiction lives, and some of it has been highly influential.” Margaret Drabble takes us through McCarthy’s major works of fiction, featured in Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction which was released this year in a deluxe collection for the very first time.
Talking Covers
What does Jonathan Franzen think of the cover for Freedom? What about Charlotte Strick, the book’s designer? Or the photographers that took photos of those trees, of that blue warbler? Talking Covers has collected their thoughts, and plays host to other cover-related conversations besides. Check out this one The Flame Alphabet.
Sofia Coppola’s Little Mermaid
Sofia Coppola will direct a live adaptation of “The Little Mermaid.” No, not the Disney version, but the Hans Christian Andersen one. Expect something darker than singing crabs.
Gaming the Bestsellers List
In lieu of writing a legitimately popular book, or having Barack Obama photographed while being “given” your book, it appears that you can get onto the New York Times bestsellers list for about $200,000.
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Text Turns to Artwork
Tom McCormack is midway through a three-part series on internet artwork, but not the kind involving Photoshop and GIFs. After exploring the history and usage of emoticons in part one of his series, McCormack traces the roots of ASCII artwork back to Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes. Stay tuned for the conclusion soon: a look at the history of emoji.
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