From The Wall Street Journal: A tale-telling axiom holds that complex narratives—whether from a writer’s quill, the pulpit or a Hollywood storyboard—are best broken into threes. From Sophocles to Coppola, the trilogy has thrived as a means to carve an enormous meal into manageable courses. World War II, history’s most complex bloodbath, often seems to require such … Read more
From Texas Monthly: If it hadn’t been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I’m not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. But there … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: “The Vanishing Half,” a critically acclaimed novel about identity and race, is on track to become not just one of the bestselling books of the year, but a 352-page cultural phenomenon. Initial print sales of the book by Brit Bennett suggest it is becoming a blockbuster with staying power. More … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: The special relationship—or, as they write it in Britain, the Special Relationship—between the United States and the United Kingdom is one of those partnerships that everyone talks about but few understand. Ian Buruma’s stimulating and highly readable “The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to … Read more
From National Public Radio: Pete Hamill was a tabloid man: a columnist and top name on the masthead, mostly for the New York Post and Daily News, who wrote punchy, passionate, lyrical chronicles of city life, often for people who had to read them while they held onto a strap, standing on the Number 7 … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: The public image of the robber barons has always been a barometer of how America thinks about wealth. Were they financiers or swindlers? Builders or monopolists? In the Progressive Era, the muckraker Ida Tarbell cast John D. Rockefeller as a ruthless monopolist, and Matthew Josephson’s compelling but one-sided Depression-era tome, … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: It’s time to celebrate the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth, born 250 years ago in a picturesque market town in northern England. One way to size up his achievement is to venture backward, beginning in the present day and drifting past the postmodernists, the modernists, the Edwardians, the Victorians, until we … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Near the midpoint of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” director George Roy Hill’s 1969 buddy movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the outlaws barge into the office of a Wyoming sheriff. Anxious to evade the hard-charging posse tracking them after a pair of train robberies, the duo beseeches … Read more
From Electric Lit: It’s been said many times already that the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the dramatic economic inequality in New York City—which of course ties into deeper systemic issues around race. But to pretend those inequalities haven’t been obvious before this time—to pretend they haven’t always been part of the city’s history—is a … Read more
This is a continuation of a prior post you can find here. Oliver Wolcott A delegate from Connecticut, Oliver Wolcott served as captain and then major general in the state militia. In 1776, he was appointed to lead 14 regiments in defense of New York City. He also commanded thousands of men in the Battle … Read more
From Electric Lit: Karl Marx may be famous for his thorough, analytic attack on capitalism (see: all three volumes and the 1000-plus pages of Das Kapital), but let’s be real: it’s not the most exciting to read. What if, just as a thought experiment, our works that reimagined current structures of power also had robots? Speculative … Read more
From The New Yorker: At the end of “Crime and Punishment,” which was completed in 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, has a dream that so closely reflects the roilings of our own pandemic one almost shrinks from its power. Here’s part of it, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s rendering: He had dreamed that the … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: When coronavirus lockdowns sent Americans into a frenzy of panic buying, the bad news came almost as quickly as the good for online organic grocer Thrive Market. In March, the company that aims to compete with Amazon.com Inc. in the health-food sector suddenly found customers flocking to its site as … Read more
From Public Books: Sometimes, when a city changes, residents are suddenly forced to ask themselves hard questions: Should we stay, or cut our losses and leave to start afresh somewhere else? Will this place still be enough like the community we love in a year or a decade to make it worth sticking it out? … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: “This is not a remote position. Candidates are expected to perform work on-site in our office,” is a line that I look for in every job posting before I decide whether or not to apply. I’m disabled; I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and I’m autistic, and working remotely is a reasonable accommodation that … Read more
Introductory comment by PG: PG regards himself as reasonably intelligent and possessing a vocabulary that is larger than that of the average homo sapiens in the year 2020. That said, he did not recall knowing (PG is at the age where there is a very occasional gap between knowing something and recalling that he knows … Read more
From The LittleHampton Gazette: Samuel and the Monster has been self-published by Alexia Pinchbeck at £9.99. . . . . Alexia, aged 38, who lives in East Wittering, said: “Samuel and the Monster, a picture book for two to five-year-olds, is a short, simple story with brightly coloured, bold illustrations that overnight put a stop … Read more
From The Los Angeles Review of Books: What if we remembered Jack Kirby not for Captain America or Galactus, but for the romance comics that he and Joe Simon produced during the late 1940s and early 1950s in their wildly successful titles Young Romance and Young Love? Kirby’s work in the genre, which he and Simon invented, are … Read more
From Everyday Health: From “Sophie’s Choice” author William Styron to poet Sylvia Plath to J.K Rowling, the mastermind responsible for the Harry Potter series, the list of famous depressed writers — many of whom have documented it in their prose — is expansive. Though there are no firm statistics on how many writers experience depression, researcher Kay … Read more
From The New York Times: A man and his son trudge through the wasteland into which human civilization has devolved. Every night, they shiver together in hunger and cold and fear. If they encounter someone weaker than they are — an injured man, an abandoned child — they do not have the resources to help, … Read more
From The Paris Review: I started reading Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, a prismatic, nightmarish work of speculative fiction, in New York City a couple weeks ago, when the coronavirus had just begun to spread into the West. Italy had fallen and the threat in the United States was imminent, but the real panic and anxiety still hadn’t … Read more
From Crime Reads: When plotting a tale of suspense, any writer worth her salt understands the importance of distraction—intriguing details that lead the reader down a path of uncertainty, false clues intentionally planted to mislead, and of course the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. This is why the red herring is a staple in mystery … Read more
From Woman Writers, Women’s Books Why is it that some characters just don’t disappear? The book is finished, the edits have been completed, the next work is in progress and yet… a particular character is still refusing to rest or retire or whatever it is that characters do when the writer has finished the book. … Read more
From Smithsonian Magazine: My dear Girl:In the first place will you allow me to suggest that you forgethereafter to tack the “ess” on to “author”, because one who writesa book or poem is an author and literature has no sex.–Gene Stratton-Porter, letter to Miss Mabel Anderson, March 9, 1923 . . . . Yellow sprays … Read more
From The National World War II Museum: When I read a collection of personal correspondence, I sometimes take for granted that I’m reading someone else’s mail. Maybe it’s because I know most of the people in those letters have passed on. Or maybe subconsciously, I tell myself that placing them into a shoebox for 75 … Read more
Perhaps an aid for character development. Or not. In any case, PG found this fascinating. From Aeon: An infant is born. The radiant mother holds the baby in her arms and immediately begins to scan the infant’s face, softly caressing the little fingers while uttering repetitive sing-song vocalisations, her face lighting up in an affectionate … Read more
From The Millions: Dress in the Age of Jane Austen has been a long time coming. It started out as a chance comment in 2013 from Professor Aileen Ribeiro, author of foundational books on dress history such as The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820. We were standing chatting in the snowy grounds of … Read more
From N+1 Magazine: For the first time since 2011, when Borders shut down, or 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle, or maybe 1455, when Johannes Gutenberg went bankrupt immediately upon printing his game-changing best seller The Bible, the news about book publishing has seemed less than dire. A June 2019 New York Times article captured the … Read more
From The New Yorker: Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance. “It was a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone—a cone-shaped smoking mountain,” she recalled. … Read more
From The Millions: C.S. Lewis gained acclaim as a children’s author for his classic series The Chronicles of Narnia. He also gained acclaim for his popular apologetics, including such works as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. What is more, he gained acclaim as a science fiction writer for his Ransom Trilogy. Furthermore, he gained … Read more
From The Illusion of More: Every once in a while, a copyright litigation story makes a fine cautionary tale for users of social platforms, and this is true partly because the conflict tends to spawn misleading headlines or comments that add fuel to an outrage already borne of ignorance. In this case, I am referring … Read more
From The Illusion of More: YouTubers call it the adpocalypse. It’s a word is used to describe the steady erosion of YouTube’s support for small and independent creators by demoting or demonetizing their channels in favor of more traditional, mainstream material. Julia Alexander at the The Verge wrote in April of this year … “Between 2011 and 2015, YouTube was a … Read more
From The BBC: We asked a panel of leading writers, curators and critics to choose 100 genre-busting novels that have had an impact on their lives, and this is the result. These English language novels, written over the last 300 years, range from children’s classics to popular page turners. . . . . Love, Sex … Read more
From The London Review of Books: ‘You ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended … Read more
From BookRiot: I’m a proud Midwesterner, and have loved to call Iowa my home for the past ten years. Iowa is full of lovely towns, both large and small, that have a locally owned independent bookstore on the main street or town square. We’re also a literary and arts hub, due to Iowa City, with … Read more
From The Times Literary Supplement: “Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist”, wrote Auberon Waugh in 1980. For the remaining twenty-one years of his life he took pleasure in adding to his list of victims. Feminism … Read more
From Wired: I don’t know about you, but every time I figure out a way of sharing less information online, it’s like a personal victory. After all, who have I hurt, advertisers? Oh, boo hoo. But sharing your information, either willingly or not, is soon going to become a much more difficult moral choice. Companies … Read more
From The Paris Review: One day in nursery school, when I was five I think, I cried. My teacher, in her floral apron with gigantic pockets, handed me a paper cup. She handed me a paper cup, and told me to collect my tears as they slid down my face and drink them. “And when … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Many of the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com see it as if it were an American big-box store, a retailer with goods deemed safe enough for customers. In practice, Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party … Read more
From The New Yorker: The Warsaw Book Fair takes place each May in the National Stadium, a basketlike structure flecked with the red and white of the Polish flag. On a bright Saturday morning, hundreds of orange balloons given out by an audiobook company bobbed from children’s hands, and crowds of readers browsed the booths … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: I’m a happy person, though you wouldn’t think that based on a particular question I’m often presented with: what happened to you as a child? Hell, even my own mom has asked me that. I write dark psychological suspense—tinged with horror—and the title of my sixth and latest release, The Dead Girl in … Read more
The following is a longer post/excerpt than PG usually includes on TPV, but the topic fascinated him. PG is happy that the foolish things he did in high school and college have disappeared into thickening mists of the fading memories scrabbling for survival within the minds of himself and fellow members of the Order of … Read more
From Medium: Last fall, in the midst of touring for my latest book, I stepped away from the public stage that arguably made my publishing career possible. After investing six years into growing my following on Twitter from zero to over 42,000, with millions of monthly engagements, I left the platform, at least for now. This might … Read more
From The Huffington Post: When I opened the gates to screen time for my 2-year-old daughter, I was planning to limit it to airplane rides and sick days. But with TV and tablets came a whole new colorful world that hooked my tot instantly, and her new word— “cartoons!” — became a constant refrain. Almost overnight, her obsession … Read more
From The Literary Hub: I keep a bulging plastic bin under my bed filled with diaries I’ve had since elementary school. They are an archive of my life, literal baggage I tote around from apartment to apartment as an adult. The notebooks are proper diaries covered in girlish stickers and locks, extra composition books from … Read more
From Medium: When I was a little kid, I fell in love with a book and read it so many times that I nearly memorized the first page. Here’s the book’s opening line: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. Do you know … Read more
From BookRiot: A school in Catalonia has withdrawn from its library 200 classic children’s books such as Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood because of their depiction of sexist stereotypes. After analyzing the contents of its library for children up to the age of six, the management of Taber School in Barcelona found that … Read more
From Indies Unlimited: Let’s be real: poetry is often treated like the wayward stepchild of the writing world. It doesn’t sell as well as other genres, so it’s not produced in the same quantities. But sales don’t equal love, and in April, poetry takes center stage in NaPoWriMo (aka National Poetry Writing Month). Much like its … Read more
From The Paris Review: My first exposure to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Lawyers for Eric Loomis stood before the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in April 2016, and argued that their client had experienced a uniquely 21st-century abridgment of his rights: Mr. Loomis had been discriminated against by a computer algorithm. Three years prior, Mr. Loomis was found guilty of attempting to flee police and operating a … Read more