“Here’s a challenge for you: find a book jacket that features an image of a woman over 40.” Despite being one of the biggest consumers of books, The Guardian writes about the lack of middle-aged women on book jackets. Pair with: an essay on the sexy-backed, faceless-woman book cover trend.
Where Are All the Middle Age Women?
“Der Nister”
Here’s a great article about the underrated Soviet/Yiddish writer Pinkhes “Der Nister” Kaganovich.
Outkube
The Onion‘s tired of incendiary comments left by trolls reading their articles. (Who isn’t?) So the publication has created Outkube, a “decoy website” rife with troll-bait. It’s hysterical. Elsewhere, they’ve started curating a list of people who just don’t get the joke.
How Could You Like That Book?
“On the other hand, I do spend endless hours mulling over the mystery of what others like. Again and again the question arises: How can they?” Tim Parks asks us why we enjoy reading what we read at The New York Review of Books. For Millions readers’ favorites, check out October’s Top 10.
“It’s Spring when I realize that I may never have children.”
If you love stories about conception, infertility, baby gorillas, cicadas, and roundabout references to Virginia Woolf, you’re going to love Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting” in Orion Magazine.
The Sleepy Short Story
Recommended Reading: Louise Erdrich’s new short story in The New Yorker, “The Big Cat,” which is about snoring among other things. “The women in my wife’s family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep.” Deborah Treisman also interviewed Erdrich about the story. “I like the idea that this story reads like a fairy tale, but there is no moral at all, unless it’s Beware of Snoring Cats. Nothing I write ever has a moral.”