With another film adaptation coming soon, Jane Austen‘s Emma is back in the cultural conversation. For JSTOR Daily, Erin Blakemore examines the popularity of the novel’s matchmaking protagonist, questioning whether she or another character, Jane Fairfax, is the true heroine. “Well-behaved and wary in public and witty in private, Austen chafed at societal obsessions with marriage, rank, and social status,” Blakemore writes. “That makes Emma a decided aberration. Unlike her other novels, which star put-upon women trying to navigate social systems that constrain them, Emma stars the ultimate insider, the kind of woman for whom those structures of hierarchy have been designed.”
Jane Austen’s Emma: The Ultimate Insider
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It’s the last day to vote on panels at SXSW interactive 2013. So if you wanna hear how our editor in chief, C. Max Magee, and our friends Andrew Womack, from The Morning News, and Kevin Nguyen, from The Bygone Bureau, have changed the game with independent long form digital publishing, you better cast your vote today.
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Not Just Any Body
“Why should Serena not respond to racism? In whose world should it be answered with good manners? The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.” Claudia Rankine writes for The New York Times Magazine about tennis player Serena Williams, racism in sports, and white privilege. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s list of books that “shed light on the history and evolution of racism in America.”
Literary Map of Manhattan
An interactive literary map of Manhattan, at The New York Times Book Review: “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” (via The Rumpus)
#ReadMoreWomen
We encourage you to join Electric Literature’s #ReadMoreWomen campaign. Their aim is to “challenge you to increase your consumption of women and nonbinary authors, and tweet at @ElectricLit with the hashtag #readmorewomen to tell us what you’re reading or recommend a book.” Sounds good to us!
Two New Elmore Leonard Stories
Byliner has published two never-before-seen stories by the late Elmore Leonard. The first story, “The Trespassers,” follows a pair of hunters, while the second focuses on a whiskey-swilling priest who gets involved in a showdown in the Wild West. (You should also read our own Bill Morris on the qualities that made Leonard a special writer.)
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Make Way for Native Excellence
“It’s about what they call Native Excellence — and creating a path to it with its own expectations and standards, instead of relying on those established by white academia or publishing.” BuzzFeed News wrote an in-depth feature on the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which offers the US’s first indigenous-centered MFA program, Terese Marie Mailhot (author of Heart Berries: A Memoir), and Tommy Orange (author of There There). Read our interview with Marcie Rendon about writing a representative novel for today’s Native Americans.
At Least Not in the Central Time Zone, That Is.
First The Times-Picayune makes major cuts to its print output, and now The University of Missouri Press is shutting down after 54 years? This is not a great week for writing.
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