Jennifer Howard

Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

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Writing

Mapping Will Cather

Summer 2023 | Fine Books & Collections

For the 150th anniversary of Willa Cather's birth, Fine Books & Collections magazine asked me to write about some of the scholarship and celebrations marking the occasion. The story's not available online, alas, but you can order the issue. Here's a taste of the article:

"A century and a half after her birth, Willa Cather (1873-1947) remains closely associated with the Great Plains. The prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska inspired some of her personal novels including O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. 'The land belongs to the future,' said one of the characters at the end of O Pioneers!  'We come and go, but the land is always here.' Cather's interest in the land, and its people, extended to almost every region of United States. She was a Nebraskan, but also a Virginian and a New Yorker, not to mention a world traveler." '
 Read More at Fine Books & Collections »

Schools of Thought Control

September 2, 2021 | The New York Times

For the New York Times Book Review, I wrote about two new middle-grade novels that confront the growing threats to kids' right to read (and think). Read More at The New York Times »

The Publishing Ecosystem in the Digital Era: On John B. Thompson’s BOOK WARS

September 2, 2021 | LARB

"One big question animates Thompson’s investigation: 'So what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time?” That sounds like hyperbole — book publishing hasn’t exactly stood still since Gutenberg. A lot happens in 500 years, even without computers. But for an industry built on the time-tested format of print books, the internet understandably looked and felt like an existential threat as well as an opportunity." Read More at LARB »

A paler shade of white: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss

January 15, 2021 | The Times Literary Supplement

Given my interest in consumer culture and what it does to people, I was glad the TLS asked me to write about Eula Biss's new book about her own vexed relationship to things:

Having and Being Had dwells on Biss’s unease about her participation in a system whose values she does not embrace, even as she savours its rewards. No pleasure can be simple. She evokes the never-satisfied hunger that characterizes life as a consumer under late-stage capitalism: "In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing."
  Read More at The Times Literary Supplement »

Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?

Sept. 2, 2020 | LitHub

Kinda yes, as I argue in this CLUTTER excerpt that ran in LitHub:

“Victorian” has persisted as a convenient if imprecise shorthand for a style that’s heavy in every sense. “Victorian decor” invokes curtains-drawn houses where light goes to die and where rooms are filled with furniture dark, heavy, and overstuffed. Victorian rooms, as we imagine them, were temples (or mausoleums) of things, with every surface— mantels, tabletops, shelves, sideboards—obscured by ceramic figurines and keepsakes, and every inch of wall covered with paintings and portraits.
Read the full essay. Read More at LitHub »

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Recent Writing

  • “Because of Winn-Dixie” turns 25
  • Teachers Learn the Art of Teaching Civics in a Hot-Button Age
  • Home Range

Recent Posts

  • My college road trip essay
  • Secret gardens
  • Fire, ice, and Feiffer

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About Jen

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Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

Latest Posts

  • My college road trip essay
  • Secret gardens
  • Fire, ice, and Feiffer
  • Twelfth Night/J6
  • November 2024: Quiet time

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