The Million Basic Plots Novelist and screenwriter Ned Beauman laments the existence of the website TV Tropes, which breaks down the plots of all forms of popular-culture storytelling into such minute parts as to prevent him from coming up with any original plot elements. I don’t write fiction but I love reading it, and I […]
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
The first fairytales were feminist critiques of patriarchy. We need to revive their legacy Melissa Ashley finds the origin of fairytales to “a coterie of 17th century French female writers known as the conteuses, or storytellers.” Fairytales “crystallised as a genre” in this time when women, sometimes as young as 15, were married off—often to
How Kurt Vonnegut Predicted the Automation Crisis Player Piano may have been written 67 years ago, but its prescience is uncanny — though not inexplicable. It is a product not only of Vonnegut’s extraordinary imagination, but his years of experience working directly with engineers, whose mentality the novel reflects in reaching its logical conclusion. Getting
GOODREADS HACKS: GET A DNF SHELF, MARK REREADS, AND MORE If you find it hard to keep up with all the cool kids who use Goodreads to track their reading, this article will put you in the know about some of the more esoteric aspects. The main subject here is how to create a DNF
I came across so many interesting articles this week that it’s hard to limit my list. Here are some of my favorites. On the Centennial of Iris Murdoch’s Birth, Remembering a 20th-Century Giant The intensity of Murdoch’s gaze, boring into you from the dust jackets of her many novels, seemed a promise of the books’
Here are some of the articles that got me thinking over the past week. On Impact Stephen King experienced (celebrated doesn’t seem like the appropriate word) an anniversary last week: 20 years since the automobile accident that nearly killed him. He wrote this article for The New Yorker a year after the accident. The Weird,
These are some of the literature-related articles from around the web that caught my eye over the past week. Quartzy HALF OF ALL TRANSLATED BOOKS IN THE US COME FROM JUST NINE COUNTRIES This one caught my eye because I’m trying to read more books translated from other languages this year. The good news:
“She took things too seriously. She was difficult and unyielding. That’s why Susan Sontag’s work matters so much even now.” This is how I see her monstrosity: residing not in whether she was or was not likeable, but in her relentlessness, and her refusal to pander. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monere, to
Quotation: Susan Sontag Was a Monster Read More »
Here’s a short entry for this busy holiday week. In Fiction, It Was the Year of the Woman An interesting look at the bulk of novels published this year: They didn’t launch any franchises — no “girl”-titled blockbusters and probably no future Jennifer Lawrence vehicles — but collectively, they dominated a shrunken literary ecosystem. Each
