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
Fish Cop
Nobody likes to be critiqued. Lucas Gardener at The New Yorker would really like to assure all of his concerned Creative Writing workshop classmates that his most recent submission, “Creative Writing Beatdown,” is entirely fictional and has no basis in reality. Really.
Stephen King Talks about a New Story
Stephen King talks to James Parker of The Atlantic about how his new short story came to be, his writing process, and the state of fiction today. He also manages to work in his opinions on Judas Priest and Metallica. Read “Herman Wouk is Still Alive” here.
Big Kindle On Sale
Normally $379, the Kindle DX, Amazon’s oversized version of the regular Kindle, is today going for $299 thanks to a one-day sale.
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East of Hollywood
Jennifer Lawrence is putting down Katniss’s bow and arrow for another literary adaption. She will star as the malevolent Cathy Ames in a new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Gary Ross, who first teamed up with Lawrence for The Hunger Games, will direct. Pair with: Our essay on vile women in fiction, which features the infamous Cathy.
The Other Saul
Earlier this month, I wrote about Louis Menand’s recent New Yorker piece about The Life of Saul Bellow, a new biography of the Nobel laureate by Zachary Leader. Now, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan reads the book. Sample quote: “Bellow’s community was his subject and his subject was his voice.”
Between Imitation and Plagiarism
“Language on a daily basis is being recycled. Our students are learning the language of the old and new masters; they are taking them in, mixing their words with the language they know, creating something new. Yet something there remains. Something familiar. Something like a forgotten first kiss. Like a well-known song sung in a different language.” Ira Sukrungruang on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Deep Reading and Mimicry, With an Ending that Totally Plagiarizes Wallace Stevens.” After all, who doesn’t want to plagiarize Wallace Stevens?
“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.