Category: literary life

Ten Films About Writers. If you’ve ever been tempted to Netflix Iris, don’t. (Is Netflix going the way of Google, and becoming a verb? It should.)

Subway riders in Mexico City are being handed free books as part of a new program that aims to simultaneously boost literacy and reduce crime.

The books in the new program, “For a Quick Read on the Metro,” are lent on the honor system: Passengers are supposed to take them as they get on the subway and return them as they exit. “It’s a program based on trust,” Cruz said.
So, far not everybody has been so honorable. Since the program started last month, 37,000 books have been lent and 64 percent have been returned. But it’s still early, said Cruz, who expressed confidence that the return rate would improve.
It is an open question whether lending books will encourage better behavior among the subway’s nearly 5 million daily riders.
One security guard on the Green Line said it might have the opposite effect. “In fact, it could promote more delinquency, because if people are reading on the subway, they might not be keeping an eye on their purse or their wallet and become an easy target” for pickpockets, he said, not wanting his name used for fear of being pegged as a naysayer. The guard said he doubted thieves would suddenly be so enthralled with literary passages that they would forget how they make their living. “They are not going to suddenly pick up a book and just stop robbing,” he said.

If you want to be taken seriously by the critics, secrecy is everything. Out goes Richard and Judy and Hay-on-Wye. In comes enforced literary purdah.

Liz Hoggard writes about Joanna Trollope’s new role as hermit-in-training and about her illustrious predecessors: J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, J.M. Coetzee, etc.

The Guardian reviews several books about Sapho.

For Carson [Anne Carson, who translated some of Sappho’s work], what matters is Sappho’s poetry, not her gender or her sexual orientation. But Sappho’s words themselves are not gender-neutral. Carson’s translation of Fragment 31 does not make clear what is clear in the Greek: the beloved and the first-person speaker are both female. “It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music,” Carson remarks in her introduction. “Can we leave the matter there?”
The answer, obviously, is no. Sappho is the first surviving female author in the Western tradition, and most of the critical and imaginative responses to her life and work have treated her gender and sexuality as the most important facts about her.

Someone’s trying to tease out fact from fiction in The DaVinci Code (do I even need to link?) My brother and sister have read the book and keep telling me to check it out, but I still haven’t.

You can listen to Jamaica Kincaid talk about subversiveness in British classics for a Morning Edition segment.

Because of her own rebellious nature, Kincaid admired characters who stood up for themselves and defied authority. Not surprisingly, the powerful figure of Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost exerted a strong pull on her imagination. Kincaid encountered the epic poem at age 7 — as a punishment, she was assigned to copy by hand books one and two. Even at that young age, Kincaid admired Lucifer’s defiance and took comfort in it. “It had the perverse effect on me of making me feel that what I had done wrong was right,” she says. “Because I was reading about someone who had done something wrong and who gloried in it.”