At the New York Times, Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses her new novel, Libertie, and how she sought to tell stories from communities not commonly heard from in history books. “I’ve always been interested in the histories of things that are lesser known,” Greenidge says. “If you come from a marginalized community, one of the ways you are marginalized is people telling you that you don’t have any history, or that your history is somehow diminished, or it’s very flat, or it’s not somehow as rich as the dominant history.”
Kaitlyn Greenidge on Seeing Past the Dominant History
“bikinis meet their match”
Planning to strut your stuff while reading on the beach? Don’t forget to match your book.
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Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
Words for Cash
Tim Parks takes a look at recent literary history and sincerely asks, does money make us write better? Supplementary reading: Nick Ripatrazone’s look into the economy of literary magazines.
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Passive Voice is for Missing Subject
“I wish all this telling women alcohol is dangerous was a manifestation of a country that loves babies so much it’s all over lead contamination from New Orleans to Baltimore to Flint and the lousy nitrate-contaminated water of Iowa and carcinogenic pesticides and the links between sugary junk food and juvenile diabetes and the need for universal access to healthcare and daycare and good and adequate food. You know it’s not. It’s just about hating on women. Hating on women requires narratives that make men vanish and make women magicians producing babies out of thin air and dissolute habits.” Rebecca Solnit on the passive voice, mysterious pregnancies, disappearing men, and the Center for Disease Control. Pair with this Millions review of Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby.
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Claire Vaye Watkins Takes Home the Dylan Thomas Prize
Kudos to Claire Vaye Watkins for taking home the Dylan Thomas Prize! Worth £30,000, the prize went to Watkins because, in the words of of the chair of the judging panel, she possesses “some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form.” (Read more about Watkins’s work in Geoff Mak’s review of her 2012 book Battleborn.)
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Rabbit, Realtor
For the low, low price of a quarter of a million dollars, John Updike’s boyhood home could be yours! (via)
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Keeping the Pace
“A story works when there’s momentum, life behind the words,” Mary Miller told Matthew Salesses at The Rumpus. She needs that momentum for her new novel, The Last Days of California, about a family driving to California for the rapture. Also, Amy Butcher wrote about her favorite Millerisms at Hobart.
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