TOBI'S DESK

In place of our usual staff picks this week, we’ve asked five contributors from  our  new Summer issue   to write about what they’re reading.  From the cover of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs.   Some books are like strange strong drinks: you know from the first sip if it’s your kind of thing. Elia Kazan’s memoir, A Life , is mine—relentless, bitterly funny, extremely unboring. Kazan, one of the most celebrated figures in midcentury filmmaking (he directed A Streetcar Named Desire , On the Waterfront , East of Eden , and more), was born in Turkey to Greek parents, and moved to New York as a child. A restless man, he maintained several sets of clothes and small bank accounts all over the world, into his seventies (when the book was written), in case he felt an urgent need to flee. He is a generous narrator and gossips freely about himself. On page six, he admits that, moments before a press conference for Splendor in the Grass , he rec

  A woodcut by Ethelbert White for a Penguin paperback edition of Walden .   This July, as the festivities in honor of Thoreau’s two-hundredth birthday commence, pilgrims will make their way to what’s called the “birthing room” on the second floor of the Thoreau Farm on Virginia Road at outskirts of Concord. This is where a new species of American thinker was born. With its low ceiling, this quiet, well-ordered bedroom, painted in a soft sage, is a place that invites silent meditation. Thoreau would have appreciated the tranquility. But he also would have directed us to the attic above. The narrow wooden steps lead to an unfinished garret. The roof is pinned together with eighteenth-century pegs, shingled with modern nails that protrude through the roof. In the eaves are a dozen boxes, mementos from a century of worship at the altar of Thoreau. Postcards, publishing notices, news clippings, proceedings, and countless letters from Thoreau’s anonymous readers. A woman from Cincinna

“I am very fortunate to be involved in a number of supportive communities who rally when things like this happen – but rarely do I laugh quite as hard as I did when reading Avid Reader’s responses.”  The Guardian has the uplifting story of how an independent Australian bookstore “took on anti-feminist trolls and won.” If for some reason, after reading that, you want to wade into an equally polarized comments section, scroll down to the conversation following  Daniel Jose Ruiz ‘s recent piece on geekdom and race . The post Suck It, MRAs appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2us07In

“When she was at Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein always wore black and refused to wear a corset. Samuel Beckett liked Wallabee boots and Aran sweaters and settled on his hairstyle when he was 17.” Proving that author worship is still alive and well,  The New York Times reviews a new book called  Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore . Come for Mark Twain ‘s white suit; stay for Zadie Smith ‘s head wraps. Semi-related: how clothing makes the (fictional) woman and man . The post Fetishized Frocks appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2u6VFzu

Brittle Paper is delighted to bring you Work Naija: The Book of Vocations. It is the second book in the ART NAIJA series, a literary project launched last year to craft concept-based anthologies exploring various aspects of Nigerian life, ideas, and artistic forms. It is also an attempt to put together a collection of exciting […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2ttxhtY

Weeks ago, we announced that Africa in Dialogue had published an e-book of interviews with the ten poets shortlisted for the 2017 Brunel Poetry Prize. The interviews were conducted by the Website’s editor Gaamangwe Joy Mogami and were published in collaboration with Praxis Magazine. We are republishing a few of them. * Richard Oduor Oduku […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2ttSW4W

In the light of recent developments in the ever-volatile Nigerian political space, 27 writers, some of them among the best-known in the country, have put out a joint statement condemning hate speech across ethnic lines. * We, the undersigned Nigerian writers, view with grave concern the dominance of ethnic incendiary speech in our country. We […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2t8EgpQ

Guinea’s Tierno Monénembo has been honoured with the 2017 Grand Prix de la Francophonie, the biggest award of the Académie Française. Founded by the Canadian Government in 1986, the 30,000-euro Grand Prix de la Francophonie is given for “the work of a French-speaking physical person who, in his country or internationally, has contributed eminently to the […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2t8xX5D

Georg Achen, Interior with reading woman , 1896   What is a short story, and who is it for? Is it alive? Is it dead? The answer, after many centuries of heated argument, is this: no one has a fucking clue. The only consensus is that you probably shouldn’t try to write short stories unless you’re independently wealthy, and you shouldn’t try to read them unless you’re a deeply adventurous, ambiguous type. To do otherwise is to risk being poor and confused—a mere rung above the poets. Chris Power offers a survey of the form and its high points, which tend to coincide, depending on whom you ask, with its low points: “ At the end of his 1941 study  The Modern Short Story , H E Bates predicted that short fiction would be the ‘essential medium’ of the war and its aftermath . In a 1962 article he admitted his mistake, and in the preface to a 1972 reissue of  The Modern Short Story  he wrote: ‘My prophecy as to the ­probability of a new golden age of the short story, such as we had on both

This isn’t an in-depth article or a traditional essay. It’s a post on reddit. But we love the connections it makes between Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti and Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterfly. Those of you who are familiar with Okorafor’s three-part space odyssey titled Binti know that it stars an African girl who goes on […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2twVL68

My parents are retired academics, and the library of their small, cozy house, which is tucked away on a country hillside in Pennsylvania, is thick with the residua of a half century in the humanities. Among the many books nestled in these overcrowded shelves are a number of Modern Library hardcovers, some with their torn Art Deco paper jackets still clinging to them, some stripped to their gilt-lettered cloth binding , among them, or so I thought, an edition of Henry Adams’s celebrated posthumous autobiography —one of the founding documents of American literature. I was back at my parents’ over the holiday, but when I looked for the book, it was mysteriously gone. The seed, however—as is so often the case with me, being one of visual association with a specific physical object—had been planted. So last month, confronted with the rare, welcome, and unexpected boon of a break in my assigned-reviewing book reading duties, I dutifully made my way to the mid-Manhattan branch of the New Y

CHAPTER TEN   Chike Nwosu joined the queue under the wooden shed. He looked around him and saw some people seated on long wooden benches eating a combination of bean cake and pap or with bread. He caught a glimpse of Bukky. She was seated on a stool, bent before a large basin of blended … Continue reading Bukky Alakara 10 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2s8uR0m

AI is changing the way we write songs—but music has always embraced machine language.   Soon after I’d arrived in New York in the late nineties I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I’d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I’d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I’d sit and write in a spiral notebook. The entry for October 16, 1998 has the title “Franchise a rock band.” Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further s

As we learned from Misery , the story of the woman who holds a man captive can never be a glamorous one. Over the course of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, we’re led to understand that Annie’s insanity—her insecurity, her obsession—is inextricable from that which makes her unlovable, a given long before she ever stumbles across the luckless object of her affections, her favorite writer, in the wreckage of his car. Dowdy and deranged, Annie forces him to rewrite his final novel according to her whims, crooning, “I’m your biggest fan,” over his tortured body. And indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look. While Glenn Close boas

“[L]ike many, many other rules in the English language, it turns out this one is built on a foundation of lies.” That whole ‘i before e, except after c rule? Bunk . Which you would already know, if you were a true spelling bee hopeful . The post A Conceit with No Conscience appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2t4Vl4b

I make no secret of the fact that books were my first love. My relationship with literature was in some senses about escapism. I sought narratives which provided me an alternative to my lived experience, stories that comforted me in times of destitution and made me the protagonist in adventures I could never conjure up in my teenage mind. My school librarian doted on me for being such an avid reader that she made me head junior librarian, this I wore as a badge of honour. I read the vast majority of books in our library’s fiction category and took full advantage of the Library’s maximum lending allowance. However, at the age of 15, something made me completely change how I saw myself in the literary context. I was going through quite a process of self-discovery particularly with my race and gender and unfortunately the books at hand were unable to support me at that stage in my life. It was becoming apparent that I could no longer position myself in narratives about white middle class

There are certain spaces where some people easily belong whereas others are easily overlooked and ignored. These spaces can come in many forms and one of the most dangerous things these spaces do is create divisions across race, class, gender, etc. This is particularly evident when we look at institutional spaces like schools, governments, and even libraries. Institutional spaces can create alienation which quickly becomes the norm; something that is later hard to break or challenge as people come to accept it as the status quo. I add libraries to this list because the service they provide is essential . Their existence allows us to escape, learn, research and it’s often a pillar institution in communities. As a child the library was a second home and a sanctuary from the boredom of a small town life, later  it became a place I slowly distanced myself from. Looking back it seems this was because I couldn’t see myself or a representation of my culture in the books around  me. London is

“The fact that Harry Potter midnight release parties were the event to go to as a teen was completely unprecedented in geek culture. You can draw a dotted line to the mainstreaming of geek culture through Harry Potter.” Twenty years after the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ,  The Huffington Post asks authors, editors, and publishers how Rowling’s juggernaut changed reading and the world of Young Adult fiction . Then see this counterpoint from our own pages last year: There Is No Such Thing as the Young Adult Novel . The post Potterversary appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2unoRkV

In 2014, Reed ran his car into a monument at the Oklahoma capitol.   Your car can get you from Point A to Point B, but if you’re willing to destroy it, it can do much more than that: it can serve as a mighty metaphor for the sanctity of the constitution. As The Washington Post reports, a man named Michael Tate Reed is “a serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments.” This week he plowed his car straight into a three-ton granite sculpture of the Commandments outside the Arkansas state capitol in Little Rock; in 2014 he did the same in Oklahoma. Reed, a devout man, seems to believe that it’s his God-given mission to uphold the boundary between church and state. I don’t mean to mock Reed, who is mentally unstable—but there’s something fascinating in his determination to reduce monuments to rubble. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. writes: “ He sent a rambling letter to the newspaper apologizing and describing the voices in his head and his attempts to recover from mental health issues . He als