At the Rumpus, Jean Kyoung Frazier discusses her novel, Pizza Girl, which centers around a pregnant pizza delivery girl who redefines the genre of slacker fiction. “I think when people shit on characters like [slackers] it’s because they don’t want to be reminded of those questions,” she says, “or that there’s something about watching a lost, fuck-up character who makes them uncomfortable, reminds them of the ugliness, the difficulty of life. If that character is also woman, well, there are going to be even more issues since beauty and perfection are so inherent to how we view and judge women. It feels really important to, even if it’s difficult, talk about characters that don’t live up to societal expectations, because ultimately, the way you make people feel ugly is by not having nuanced and widespread portraits of them in popular, mainstream media.”
An Ode to the Female Slacker with Jean Kyoung Frazier
History and Story
In a piece for Public Books Rebecca Steinitz reviews some recent historical novels, including The Luminaries and The Invention of Wings, and argues that the best historical fiction “plunges the reader wholly into the past, enlightening and entertaining us, while also making us reflect on our present, in history and in literature.” Pair her piece with Laila Lalami‘s account of “How History Becomes Story.”
The Poet Laureate of Happiness
Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More Time
Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it’s not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that “the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.”
“Polyamory is the ambitious but campy attempt to love without loss”
If you enjoyed last week’s sneak peek at Elisa Gabbert’s forthcoming poetry collection, you’ll want to check out her collaboration with Kathleen Rooney at Nailed Magazine.
The Gallery of Lost Art
The Gallery of Lost Art is “an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared,” and my-oh-my is it a doozy of an internet diversion.