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
One Child Fiction
In 2013, Mo Yan became China’s first resident Nobel Laureate in Literature, which prompted a huge swell of interest in his books in the West. In the Times, Janet Maslin reviews Frog, his latest novel to get an English translation. Sample quote: “Mo Yan, whose real name is Guan Moye, says everything he needs to about the Cultural Revolution with a scene in which Tadpole and other schoolboys eat coal and claim to find it delicious.” You could also read Alan Levinovitz on modern Chinese literature.
Not Your Usual Book Report
Tired of assigning that regular ol’ book report? Take queues from the New York Times “Lesson Plan” on how to go beyond.
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Look Who’s Talking Knau
“I could not do anything but wiggle, so I wiggled.” Here’s a fake excerpt from the non-existent seventh book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, helpfully titled Look Who’s Talking Knau.
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State of Terror
Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has been deemed “un-patriotic” and “anti-Dominican” by the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York City. Diaz had been working in Washington with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat in the hopes of urging the U.S. government to take action against the abhorrent treatment of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic.
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End of an Era
Fifteen years later, Salman Rushdie and John Le Carre have ended their feud.
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A Lover’s Discourse
This Valentine’s Day, break out the Barthes and let critical theory decide the shape and scope of your sweet nothings.
Hard Choices
Recommended Listening: David Sedaris presented three short stories while guest hosting WNYC’s Selected Shorts. The three stories were written by Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, and Frank Gannon, and each one has to do with “hard choices,” says Sedaris.
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