Remember Hans Christian Andersen's tear-jerker "The Little Match Girl"? Two new middle-grade novels revisit the story in search of happier endings. I wrote about them for The New York Times Book Review. Read More at The New York Times »
Writing
Mapping Will Cather
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
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
"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
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 »
