The founder of Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim, spoke to HuffPost‘s “We Built This” series on her passion for literacy and the urgency of protecting black women: “There’s a vastness to blackness that needs to be recognized, especially in media, especially in literature, in film. […] We need more artists who are willing to share their imaginations with us and see blackness in a more beautiful and profound way.” Our own Martha Anne Toll recently spoke to Edim as well about the recent Well-Read Black Girl anthology.
Glory Edim’s Empire of Knowledge
Views of the Sandworm
Now that classic sci-fi mag Omni has risen from the Hades of publishing, editors are combing its massive archives in search of material to republish. Among that material, it turns out, are drawings of Dune homeworld Arrakis — drawings that happen to be endorsed by none other than Frank Herbert himself.
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Orwell in Burma
Three weeks ago, Vishwas Gaitonde wrote a piece for us about a house in India once owned by the family of George Orwell. Now, in the Times, Jane Perlez pays a visit to Burma, where Orwell served in the Imperial Police Force and gathered impressions for his first novel, Burmese Days.
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Detective Edgar Allan Poe
Before Maxwell’s ever opened, Edgar Allan Poe tried to solve a murder mystery in my native Hoboken.
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Working-Class Heroine
“That no-way-out is really the difference between boys and girls in working-class culture, because a working-class boy could run, or could when I was growing up.” Guernica interviews Dorothy Allison about literature as glory; survival, opportunity, and gender; and working-class heroes vs. heroines. For your reading consideration: Bill Morris‘s essay on the riches of “white trash” literature.
The Ball Is a Woman
“Now I get paid to do something I have loved since I was 4 years old. Other than my family, is there anything else I have loved so unconditionally, for so long?” Georgia Cloepfil in N+1 on the uncompromising, compromised life of the professional female athlete. See also: some thoughts about hosting the World Cup.