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For the New York Review of Books , Madeleine Schwartz examines the works of Sally Rooney , who was recently crowned “the great millennial novelist,” by many critics. Rooney’s two novels, Normal People and Conversations with Friends , are both intimate portraits of Irish college students set in the recent present. “As a portrait of young people today, Rooney’s books are remarkably precise—she captures meticulously the way a generation raised on social data thinks and talks,” Schwartz writes. “Rooney’s characters love to announce where they fall on the matrix of taste and social awareness. They read Patricia Lockwood and watch Greta Gerwig movies; they read Twitter for jokes. Decisions are made according to typologies.” Photo credit: Jonny L Davies The post The Great Millenial Novelist appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2JSS9V9

Sarah Moss. Around Christmastime, which seems as far away as the late Iron Age by now, there were whisperings of a book that was as yet hardly known on our shores: Ghost Wall . The slim novel by Sarah Moss is about a small knot of students doing extracurricular research credits for their college archaeology course by living like Iron Age Britons for a few summer weeks. They are joined by an amateur enthusiast and his family, and I set the book down at first for being too pedantic. Even the fierce loyalty of our grade school narrator toward her father can’t hide her nascent skepticism—or is it the author’s?—regarding his monomaniac devotion to a pure British past. A large portion of contemporary writing is a critique of the bourgeois condition: comfortable linen tunics, smug salads, and sparkling résumés. Ghost Wall left me feeling fine about food co-op bulletin boards and Dan Barber books, but the real treat of the novel is the fucking desecration of all men. The men in the book ar

In her new monthly column  Re-Covered , Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front , by the German World War One veteran Erich Maria Remarque, was an international bestseller. His blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year, Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached popular children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked if she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title — ‘ All Quaint on the Western Front — and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories which mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of

Attending the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference is like holding your wedding reception in the middle of your bar or bat mitzvah.  Everyone you have ever known—perhaps everyone you have ever met—is here, and they do not belong together.  Your ex from your MFA program is here.  So is that weird kid who never once talked during workshop.  Also here are the two children that the two of them have had together during their 15 years of happy marriage.  Also here is the person with whom you ceaselessly chat on Google Hangouts to pass the long hours of the workday at the job you have had for the 15 years since your MFA program ended.  It is nice to see that person, though it’s weird that they are corporeal. Also present are 12,000 to 15,000 other people who self-identify as “writers,” some of them so young it’s impossible to imagine that they have yet learned how to ride a bike (though, with a smart phone, who needs a bike—why go anywhere?); some of them so old that it

In Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America , Box Brown surveys the broad history of marijuana, from its role in Hindu mythology to its importation into the Americas by Spain. Brought into the U.S. by Mexican immigrants in the 19th century, marijuana eventually became associated with jazz musicians and inevitably became tainted by a racist social mythology—one that linked weed to violence and sex—which was used to justify legal restrictions of the drug. In this illuminating work of graphic nonfiction, Brown provides a thoughtful look at the history, pharmacological affects, and legalization movement surrounding marijuana in North America. This is a 15-page excerpt. This piece was produced in partnership with  Publishers Weekly  and also appeared on  publishersweekly.com . The post Panel Mania: ‘Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America’ by Box Brown appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2U2pXUy

  Content Warning: This story contains depictions of anti-gay violence.   Please just let me die, being alive hurts too much. —KESHA, PRAYING   Justice was already seated at a table when you arrived at the eatery. You would forever remember his name. Justice. His eyes seemed to smile when they meet yours, they seemed […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Yw8Zg1

  Before I run deep into this hole, I read stories of fathers that left home without returning And waited; When my body will be beautiful enough to lure artists closer to my breast, When my voice will be fruitful enough to attract the attention of neighbouring farmers To write about a city where children […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2YCJU35

Photo by Dialog Center Images via Flickr (Creative Commons) Many years ago, I met a couple at a dinner party who had brought along their two-year old son. The mother was Jewish, and the father was a practicing Buddhist from Tibet. Making small talk in the kitchen, the mother began to tell me about how she had been unable to get pregnant, so her husband had gone to their lama to ask him to bless them with a child. Some months later they successfully conceived, but before they broke the news to friends and family, they received a call from the lama who told them that their unborn son was the reincarnation of a bodhisattva—a being who has achieved enlightenment but chooses to reincarnate for the good of the world. As she told me this story, I felt dizzy and entranced. All I could see was her suddenly illuminated face; all I could hear was her voice. Now, I am not a Buddhist, but I experienced what she said about her child as true. He was beautiful and played quietly on the floor at ou

  Nigerian writer, Lawyer and publisher Richard Ali is the featured guest of this week’s #PoetryTalk interview series. We discuss his debut poetry collection, The Anguish and Vigilance of Things, and love, identity, places, extremism, Arabic poetry and literary collectives and collaborations across Africa.     *** Uche Congrats on your debut poetry collection! For […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2V2sB9p

How do you solve a problem like gingerbread? That’s the question Helen Oyeyemi found herself answering while writing her sixth novel, aptly titled Gingerbread . The illustrious author’s follow up to the short story collection What Is Yours Is Not Yours is a challenging book. It was challenging for Oyeyemi to write. It is challenging to describe. It is challenging to read—in the sense that it reads like very few books written this millennium. It is also a rewarding book. Oyeyemi wrote Gingerbread in two of her favorite cities, places where she says she daydreams more recklessly. The result is a story about a mother who loves gingerbread more than nearly anything and her family’s mysterious heritage. The book, unlike her loose retelling of “Snow White” in Boy, Snow, Bird , doesn’t directly link to a fairy tale—in this case “Hansel and Gretel.” Rather, it asks why gingerbread was used by the witch to lure the two children at all. I spoke with Oyeyemi about creating a problem book, w

At this point, you might think everyone who was going to write about Marie Kondo would have done it already. We did . But then Kondo’s Netflix show came out, and as Hannah McGregor puts it , “the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter.” McGregor’s essay for Electric Literature recaps some of these opinions, and the opinions about the opinions, and fits it all into a much longer history of consumerism and books. “We could pull apart the xenophobia, racism, orientalism, and classism at work in these critiques all day,” McGregor writes, “but I want to focus on how self-identified bookish people reacted to the association of books with clutter, the demotion of these objects from sacred to banal—or, maybe more accurately, the insistence that they are no more sacred than any other objects.” The post Are Books Clutter? appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2HYgN4b

Larissa Pham’s monthly column,  Devil in the Details, takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history. In this installment, she focuses on women in bathrooms. Edgar Degas, La Toilette , c. 1884–86 The door of my childhood bedroom didn’t have a lock on it, so I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Every human wants privacy, but no one more than a teenage girl. Though I ostensibly shared the bathroom with my little brother, I claimed it as my domain. I spent hours reading on the tiled floor, my body bracketed between the sink and the door. In my memory, it’s a slightly steamy, always warm, watery place—but I never spent that much time in the bath. If I wasn’t reading or sulking after a fight with my parents, I was performing those charmless beauty rituals teenage girls are so fond of—shoving my A-cup breasts together trying to make cleavage magically appear in the mirror; waxing my legs with a kit I’d surreptitiously tipped into the family shoppin

On March 19th, poet Claudia Rankine published her debut play, The White Card , which, according to Graywolf Press, poses an essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible? The Millions sat down with Rankine to discuss the differences between writing for the page and for the stage, and watching her work take life in the theater. The Millions: What made you decide to write The White Card , and specifically to format it as a play? Claudia Rankine: Our inability to have conversations is manifesting as a national crisis. As poet T.S. Eliot writes, we must “after tea and cakes and ices,/ Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis.” Since plays can perform an imagined possibility, I wanted the genre to help me see what a continued discussion around race could look like. TM: Why publish the play in book form a year later? In particular, why now? CR: Never has it seemed more urgent for us to begin to trouble the conversations we attempt reg