A nibble or two of linkspam
Dept of, I keep feeling they're desperately avoiding the obvious analogy like the elephant in the room: I keep seeing reviews and articles about this young writer - which invoke the phrase the [X] writer for/of the Now Times - this invocation of Some Other Writer of the past is present in this review of her latest. I haven't read the books, but from the way they're described in the reviews and articles, I can't help thinking, um, aren't you reaching for 'the Edna O'Brien de nos jours'? except, of course, Dame Edna is still alive and for all I know, kicking.
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Dept of, this sounds like another of those projects made up in desperate search of a book contract: Help Me! by Marianne Power review - can self-help books really change your life? Also, surely a lot of self-help manuals do tell you to keep up the good work for longer than a month? is a month long enough to see any improvement/change? Do their prescriptions contradict one another? Do you get whiplash switching from one guru's recommendations to the next? I do not think I am motivated enough to read the book to find out, though.
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Dept of, Laura Riding, scarier than the trenches of the Western Front: This sober biography includes convincing readings of his poetry, but it takes Graves’s charismatic lover to set the narrative alight.
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Dept of, encouraged to see where I put my copy of King Kong Theory: interview with Virginie Despentes: doesn't this just nail a certain phenomenon: In Vernon Subutex, Despentes has created a male character who has captured the French imagination. In hindsight she feels readers and critics were a lot kinder to this hapless man than they would have been if it were a woman. “I think if there had been a female central character, the work would have been seen much less as a portrait of its generation and more as the story of a woman who messes up.”
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Dept of, condescension of posterity; and also, that noxious thing where, while bigging one thing up, you put something else down. Jeanette Winterson is yay about Orlando and slags off The Well of Loneliness - can't find the link for the article I saw today, but observe that she has form for this. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2813075.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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