paper trail

Mar 7, 2013 @ 12:47:00 am

Michelle Orange

Where are all the great female cultural critics? The Slate Book Review considers the question in light of Michelle Orange’s new essay collection.

Julian Barnes ruffled feathers among this British literati this week by claiming that compared to their foreign counterparts, Brits are especially bad at writing about sex. Since the ban was lifted on Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Barnes says that there’s "not just a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.” And that, he continues, has created its own set of problems: "Sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new cliches."

Writer Abigail Samoun and artist Elizabeth Haidle have started a Kickstarter project in an attempt to raise $7,450 to self-publish a graphic novel about visionary Serbian scientist and Thomas Edison rival Nikola Tesla.

New York Magazine poses twenty-one questions to Richard Hell, author of the new memoir I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.

Amelia Gray’s Threats, Laird Hunt’s Kind One, T. Geronimo Johnson's Hold It 'Til It Hurts, Thomas Mallon’s Watergate, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club are the five contenders for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Mohsin Hamid talks to the Atlantic about taking fitness tips from Haruki Murakami.