How a Twitter war in 2010 helped change the way we talk about women’s writing
A look at how the 2010 dust-up between writers Jennifer Weiner and Jonathan Franzen engendered a decade-long pop culture discussion over two basic questions: “What kinds of stories do we consider to be worthy of respect? And to whom do those stories belong?”
7 OF THE BEST BOOKS ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS FROM 2019
“One of the most practical ways to combat stigma around mental illness is to raise awareness in society about it, and what better way to do that than through books.”
This article discusses these 7 books from 2019:
- THE HEARTLAND BY NATHAN FILER (FABER)
- MIND ON FIRE BY ARNOLD THOMAS FANNING (PENGUIN)
- NOTES MADE WHILE FALLING BY JENN ASHWORTH (GOLDSMITHS PRESS)
- THE COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS BY ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG (PENGUIN)
- BIPOLAR DISORDER – THE ULTIMATE GUIDE BY SARAH OWEN & AMANDA SAUNDERS (ONEWORLD)
- WHERE REASONS END BY YIYUN LI (HAMISH HAMILTON)
- DORA: A HEADCASE BY LIDIA YUKNAVITCH (CANONGATE)
Gone Boys
Hillary Kelly writes in Vulture that during the past decade women have replaced men as important authors:
Where once a passel of middle-ish-aged men — Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon, the rest of the Jonathans (Lethem, Safran Foer) — dominated the scene with their big, important distillations of the world, the voices that now stand out, the ones that drive the conversation around fiction, largely belong to women.
The Top Twenty-Five New Yorker Stories of 2019
The New Yorker lists its top stories of the year in terms of how much they influenced readers to subscribe to the magazine. These are the stories most relevant to the literary world:
5. “What If We Stopped Pretending?,” by Jonathan Franzen
“The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.”
8. “A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions,” by Ian Parker
“Dan Mallory, who writes under the name A. J. Finn, went to No. 1 with his début thriller, “The Woman in the Window.” His life contains even stranger twists.”
10. “The Art of Decision-Making,” by Joshua Rothman
“Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be.”
13. “The Lingering of Loss,” by Jill Lepore
“My best friend left her laptop to me in her will. Twenty years later, I turned it on and began my inquest.”
17. “Father Time,” by David Sedaris
I can’t predict what’s waiting for us, lurking on the other side of our late middle age, but I know it can’t be good.
“Little Women” and the Marmee Problem
“The anger of Marmee, the mother of the March sisters, is central to Louisa May Alcott’s novel, and yet it’s hidden in plain sight.”
Is Sentimentality in Writing Really That Bad?
Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert discusses the difference between sentiment and sentimentality in writing.
In these new audiobooks, great tales are matched with great narrators
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I don’t talk much about them in terms of their distinctive format. Here, Katherine A. Powers recommends three new audiobooks with “great narrators.”
The Long Tail of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’
In The New York Times, Alexandra Alter discusses Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, published in summer 2018:
A year and a half later, the novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” an absorbing, atmospheric tale about a lonely girl’s coming-of-age in the marshes of North Carolina, has sold more than four and a half million copies. It’s an astonishing trajectory for any debut novelist, much less for a reclusive, 70-year-old scientist, whose previous published works chronicled the decades she spent in the deserts and valleys of Botswana and Zambia, where she studied hyenas, lions and elephants.
© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown
