At Vogue, Sally Rooney discusses her hotly anticipated new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, and the books that provided a basis for her observational, haunting prose. “When I look at my own reading life, the books that I’ve felt completely swept away by are set among the landed gentry in 19th-century Britain, which I really don’t identify with at all,” Rooney says. “But I care about [those people] very much if they’re in a Jane Austen novel or a George Eliot. I guess what a novel can do is take you to a particular social world and particular relationship dynamics that play out in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing in the doorway, looking in and observing exactly what’s happening.”
Standing in the Doorway with Sally Rooney
Talking Truth to Power
“Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider. She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.” The New Yorker profiles Gloria Steinem in anticipation of her latest release, My Life on the Road.
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French Fiction
Recommended recommendations: Nancy Kline surveys recently translated French novels for the New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s piece in the Daily Beast on the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano and “Why American’s Don’t Read Foreign Fiction.”
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Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
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The Hype Cycle
Elif Batuman entertainingly muses on “hype” and resolves to “write five 5-star Amazon reviews this month of books I love by living authors.”
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The Words of E.B. White
E. B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of Charlotte’s Web; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Later on, he helped define the voice of the early New Yorker. Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White.