At the Believer, Raven Leilani, author of Luster, discusses her desire to write Black women who actively resist conforming to society’s preconceptions about them. “I wanted to afford a Black woman the latitude to be fallible,” she says. “I wanted to write against the idea that there is a particular way to comport yourself to earn the right to empathy. Black women are especially subject to this expectation, and I think to have to expertly navigate racist and sexist terrain to survive and be denied the right to a human response is to deny that person dignity. It’s a recipe for a repressed, combustible person. I’ve been there, and I’m still unlearning that reflexive curation as we speak, so it was a relief to write a Black woman who leads with her id. It was a relief to write toward her want and rage without apology, which is, unfortunately, what some people might find unlikeable.”
Raven Leilani on Unapologetically Writing Towards Want and Rage
Women Writers’ Firsts
Over at Ploughshares, reflect on eight women writers’ accomplishments spanning twenty-six centuries. For more impressive writing by women, read Edan Lepucki and Meaghan O’Connell’s discussion of David Copperfield.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Alameddine; Palacio; Semple; Lianke; French; Chang; Zink
New this week: The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine; The Mortifications by Derek Palacio; Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple; The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke; The Trespasser by Tana French; The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang; and Nicotine by Nell Zink. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
Act 266, Scene 6
How do you turn a 900-page novel into a play? You make it five hours long, that’s how. Roberto Bolaño’s classic 2666 is headed for the stage.
On Marathon Readings
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, David Shapiro remarks on the current popularity of the marathon reading, or “a format of communal public performance that has more in common with the filibuster than the conventional literary reading.” Previously, Jeff Price wrote a piece on our site concerning the particular camaraderie that arises among participants and audience members during marathon readings. (As a bonus: I share a David Foster Wallace anecdote in the comments for that piece.)
Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d’triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
“Want” and “rage” and “without apology.” Sounds like my five year-old. Or Donald Trump. Lead with that id, folk; seriously? Women imitating the worst behaviors of immature and toxic men is not a step towards progress.
“Imitating the worst behaviors” is what’s turned me off a lot of contemporary female writers, whose subjects and style exemplify, imo, the worst of male entitlement. But this book really hit home for me, because the narrator’s id is presented with compassion and humility. It’s an amazing balancing act to write in the voice of a woman–a person–who is so very present, and vulnerable, in her life (and in THE present). She watches herself from outside herself, as we do, trying to make sense of why she is motivated to act as she does. Sometimes she succeeds in understanding herself; sometimes not. She is not uncaring or selfish, like so many modern characters. She just IS, unapologetically. I thought this book was a revelation.