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- The Cut has the scoop on some truly shocking news:
They said a novel about male sexual desire couldn't be written. But they didn't know John Colapinto.
- The Toast’s Women Writers You Should Know series kicks off with a piece on Constance Fenimore Wilson:
After her death, her reputation rapidly faded. Despite a series of obituaries that hailed her as America’s foremost female writer, she was left out of the literary canon formed at the turn of the twentieth century. She wasn’t alone: as the canon took shape, it was all male, eclipsing the contributions of women writers.
- LitHub’s Tournament of Sex Writing finds a winner; personally I am amazed Philip Roth made it as far as he did.
- LitHub is also the home of your new favorite advice columnist, the Grumpy Librarian. We here at Vox also fully endorse throwing a temper tantrum and getting thrown out of book club when it’s necessary.
- Tor’s classic fantasy reread has reached The Tombs of Atuan, my personal favorite Ursula Le Guin novel:
The Tombs of Atuan captures the essence of great fantasy in a way few other works of fantasy can ever hope to match. If the purpose of fantasy is to explore the interior—the inner space of the human soul—no one has done this with greater effectiveness than Le Guin does in this novel.
- Publisher’s Weekly talked to Beverly Cleary about her upcoming 100th birthday and what her characters are up to now:
"Beezus," Cleary surmises, "would be a nurse, or a teacher, and would marry and have maybe two children. She would struggle in today’s world to bring them up properly." As for Henry, "he would be a building contractor, because he built a clubhouse. And Ramona—I really don’t know," she says. "I think she would probably try several different jobs and maybe go backpacking around Europe with some friends."
- Ainehi Edoro explains How Not to Talk about African Fiction at the Guardian:
African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.
This perception of African literature has a history. It can be traced to what I’ve come to think of as the anthropological unconscious of the African novel. Academic institutions were the first to notice that there was such a thing as African fiction.
- NPR discusses how YA lit can help teens talk about and understand sexual consent.
"The first time I taught Speak, someone disclosed they had been raped to me," he remembers. "And it was actually a boy." He says that every year he taught the novel, students privately told him similar stories.
- April marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and just in time, a Scottish manor house has found a new First Folio. That brings us up to 234 worldwide.
- That Gay Talese scandal, in which the author and journalist reportedly said he couldn't name a single female writer who inspired him, sure was unfortunate.
- Over at Catapult, Tanwi Nandini Islam recounts what it's like to go on tour as a new, unknown author:
Being on the road for weeks at a time is a romanticized trope. I wanted to believe myself some sort of traveling author inciting crowds while signing millions of books. That’s not reality for a debut author.
