I wrote a long post on FB inspired by a conversation from a friend who recently rewatched the DS9 ep "Far Beyond the Stars" and was under the impression that its portrayal of SFF publishing practices was accurate. So:

Cait rants about the erasure of science fiction history:

One of my problems with the current resistance to canon-formation and its ( Read more... )

"Full-body reading: Literary criticism taught me to scrub my feelings out of my reading, but a medieval mystic showed me how to put them back in" by Anna Wilson

The Book of Margery Kempe challenges what it meant to critically engage with a text. Amid Kempe’s loud weeping and marriage ceremonies with Jesus, there was her rebuke to the priest about ( Read more... )

Re-Queering Sappho by Ella Haselswerdt

Once, at a small dinner party with some fellow classicists, a genuinely lovely and brilliant male colleague floated a pet theory of his: Sappho was actually a man. It’s a perverse idea, but not an outrageous one. Sappho has long been celebrated as the lone female voice of Ancient Greece, and none of the ( Read more... )

Remember how I was reading Elena Ferrante and wondering what was up with her literary acceptanceWell I'm about 4/5 done with her third book, and I think it's literary because it's about bad, unfulfilling sex and how marriage and children make women miserable. Which, full points for edginess there, I guess, but well, it bugs me that if you have a ( Read more... )

The Mysterious, Anonymous Author Elena Ferrante on the Conclusion of Her Neapolitan Novels

I’ve noticed that the critics who seem most obsessed by the question of your gender are men. They seem to find it impossible to fathom how that a woman could write books that are so serious-threaded with history and politics, and even-handed in their ( Read more... )

So has anyone been reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels? The literary world is nuts for them: See her coverage at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Vanity Fair, among others.

I finished reading the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, last week, and am about halfway through the second, The Story of a New Name, right now. (I feel it says ( Read more... )

I'm reading an interesting, older book I've never heard of until recently by Jane Marcus called Art and Anger, which is basically feminist criticism about women's reading and criticisms of women's reading. Anyway in an essay towards the end she reproduces this fascinating poem by Catherine des Roches (c. 1555-84), from an unpublished translation by ( Read more... )

So I'm reading The Fellowship by Phillip and Carol Zaleski, which is a pretty massive biography of the Inklings. It's good, but I'm getting tired how all of the women--or at least everyone but Mrs. Moore, who possibly was the lover of CS Lewis--are always offstage having babies and doing gods know what, while the homosocial literary meetings just ( Read more... )

"Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name" by Catherine Nichols

I sent the six queries I had planned to send that day. Within 24 hours George had five responses-three manuscript requests and two warm rejections praising his exciting project. For contrast, under my own name, the same letter and pages sent 50 times had ( Read more... )

A follow-up to Kamila Shamsie's provocation to "let’s have a year of publishing only women":

Small press And Other Stories will produce no books by men in 2018 in answer to Kamila Shamsie’s call for direct action to beat gender bias in publishing

And Other Stories, the literary press that uses a network of readers to source its titles, has become ( Read more... )