At Catapult, Janice Lee explores story structures at the sentence level, as seen in her recent novel, Imagine a Death. “We often glean meaning from the overall structure of a story, the narrative shape revealing something about subjects like reality, transformation, life and death. But before the story, there is the sentence. Across cultures and languages, the subject/object and noun/verb relationships we see in English are neither universal nor inherent. Not all languages focus on a subject’s action upon an object (many Asian languages, for example, put the emphasis on the verb, rather than the subject coming first), and many indigenous languages have an increased focus on verbs, rather than nouns. […] The sentence itself can reveal an entire worldview through the shape it assumes, through the relationships it maps, which ideological systems it upholds, what power structures it validates simply through its grammar.”
Janice Lee Explores the Worldview of a Sentence
5 under 35
The National Book Foundation announces the 5 Under 35 Selections for 2009.
Seeking Order in Chaos
“Writing an autobiography was therapeutic and traumatic at times, but unlike the novel it continues its therapies and trauma long after I’ve written it.” Laura van den Berg interviews Porochista Khakpour about the differences between novels and memoirs, structure, and Khakpour’s upcoming memoir, Sick. (Sick is one of our most anticipated June releases).
Ahead of His Time
“Adrianne [Lobel] suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are ‘of the same sex, and they love each other,’ she told me. ‘It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.’ In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, [Arnold] Lobel came out to his family as gay.” On love and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
Appearing Elsewhere
My review of Eowyn Ivey‘s debut novel, The Snow Child, is up at Slate.
Reading Rainbow Forever & Always
For every reader who grew up enamored with LeVar Burton‘s now-cancelled PBS show, Reading Rainbow, there’s fresh hope. A Kickstarter campaign to create a spin-off, web-based version of Reading Rainbow that aims to spread literacy to children in under-served schools was launched yesterday and has already received a significant portion of its funding goal. While there are some concerns about the project, the nostalgia factor is incredibly strong, and who doesn’t want to spread the love of reading to children?