Jonathan Franzen is a little like Times Square, the Eiffel Tower, or a Dutch windmill. If you’re a local, you can protest all you want that he’s not the only sight worth seeing, that you know other, less touristy spots, that there’s more to our great country than this one monument that’s on all the postcards. The foreign visitors won’t be satisfied until they’ve been there.
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Letters to Tiptree
A moving letter to Tiptree from Gwyneth Jones: http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150824/1jones-c.shtml
Read More ...Station Eleven
I’m looking forward to Emily St. John Mandel’s event at the American Book Center in Amsterdam. She’ll read from Station Eleven–the book I saw in every airport in America this summer–and I’ll do a Q&A with her afterward. The reading is Friday, August 28, at 18:30; more info at abc.nl/events.
Read More ...Alice Sheldon’s 100th birthday: August 24, 1915
“I think you ‘stand’ being a woman exactly as I stand being me, what is oneself that one ‘stands’ but a peculiar cloudy fiery lens, an invisible intersection of fluxes of experience, a nothing that is everything and everywhere?”
–James Tiptree, Jr., to Joanna Russ, 1975
Alice Sheldon would have been 100 years old today.
Read More ...For Alice Sheldon’s 100th birthday: Letters to Tiptree
In honor of Alice Sheldon’s 100th birthday, Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is publishing a selection of “letters to Tiptree” by an impressive list of science fiction and fantasy writers, editors, critics, and fans. Nicola Griffith’s letter also appeared last month in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Brit Mandelo’s letter has been excerpted at Tor.com. More on Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, at the Twelfth Planet website.
Read More ...For Alice Sheldon’s 100th birthday
“I dreamt I was falling in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t want me. So I tried getting myself killed on three continents. Years passed. Finally, when I was really old, she appeared on the other end of the promenade in New York and with signals (like the ones they use on aircraft carriers to […]
Read More ...A Twinkle in Alice Neel’s Eye
For my book on mothers & writers I’ve been reading and thinking about the painter Alice Neel (1900-1984). Neel was known for her portraits; she saw herself as a political painter, chronicling her time “using the people as evidence.” She was especially sympathetic to people whose individual humanity has not always been acknowledged in paint: […]
Read More ...Sable, Champagne, Ghost, Bone: Rankine, Oyeyemi, Morrison
The most talked-about, most prize-winning book of poetry in the United States right now is “Citizen: An American Lyric,” by the Jamaican-American writer and performer Claudia Rankine. Published in the midst of the Ferguson protests, Rankine’s prose poems are an attempt to make the reader feel the workings of racism—not only the prejudice and aggression […]
Read More ...The Value of Satire
Courage isn’t always as high-minded as we might like. In light of the PEN controversy I’m reposting my last January FB post about Charlie Hebdo, with my thoughts from an Amsterdam point of view.
Read More ...Lessing: no luck
Best of success to Patrick French, who was chosen by the estate of Doris Lessing to write her biography. From all the work I’ve done on her so far I think she’ll keep a biographer very good company. I’m looking forward to publishing my essay on her in The Baby on the Fire Escape; the story of Lessing’s motherhood is very different from the one you think you know.
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