Last week, we had the pleasure of reading John Warner’s great article, “The White Male F*ck-Up Novel,” over at Book Riot. “You know the story,” Warner writes, “white male protagonist, comes from a privileged background, should have the world by the short hairs, but manages to screw up his life at every turn. Depression, extra-marital affairs, other methods of self-sabotage. Bellow made a career of them.” While it’s true that the field is overrun with these “WMFuNs,” we couldn’t help but wonder: what about all the lady bunglers in literature? True, the male screw up is more iconic (as of course is the male protagonist, for that matter), but we wanted to give our favorite tragic heroines a little love as well. After all, as Daisy Buchanan famously opined, “that’s about the best a girl can hope for these days, to be a pretty little fool.” Right. Click through to see our list of white female fuck up novels, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments.
Peter Nadas’s novel Parallel Stories, which will be released this November, clocks in at well over 1,000 pages. In an interview with New York, the Hungarian author queried, “Why wouldn’t Musil, Mann, or Broch be my contemporaries?” In honor of his ambition, we’ve compiled a list of 10 novels that could also function as doorstops if you decide to give up on them. Maybe you’ve tried to impress your friends by casually mentioning that you’re finally reading Proust, or you’re the annoying person on the train with the weighty tome in both hands, jostling into your fellow passengers because you can’t spare a free hand — whatever the reason, we salute you, foolhardy readers. Have any of you finished the following novels with ease? If so, let us know in the comments section.
The world of celebrity baby-naming is an odd and occasionally alarming one. But we have to say, the latest trend is one we can get down with: Both Neil Patrick Harris and the Beckhams named their baby daughters Harper, after the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. And it got us thinking about other literature-inspired names that might be sweeping the ranks soon. Maybe Eudora will make a comeback in homage to Miss Welty? Perhaps Huck will sweep the naming registers? After all, the current number one names — Isabella and Jacob — have the Twilight series to thank. Below, our abridged list of literary baby names and what they mean.
The big news on the Internet today is that spoilers don’t ruin books — in fact, they actually increase the pleasure we get out of reading them. These scientific findings fly in the face of just about every other comment on every film and TV blog we’ve ever read, but we don’t actually find them terribly surprising. Some of Western culture’s best-loved a most-read books are, after all, ones whose endings are so widely known that most of us know them before we even pick up the book. After the jump, we’ve compiled — and revealed the outcomes of — ten classic works of literature that we read (and, in the case of plays, watch) even though they’ve already been “spoiled” for us.
This week, we came across this list of ‘books you really should have read in high school’ over at MSNBC’s Today Books. While their picks are definitely classics, most of which we did in fact have to read in high school, we think today’s youth (and any adults playing catch-up, which let’s be real, is almost everybody to some extent) would be better served by a few alternate choices. The classics are wonderful, but the canon should be fluid, allowing some experimental choices as well as the tried-and-true. Of course, kids today should read hundreds of books, if possible, so this is by necessity a finite, imperfect list reflecting, as it must, our own proclivities. Let us know your own choices for essential alternative high school reading in the comments!
Our friends at HuffPost recently put together a fascinating list of the literary characters their readers find sexiest. What we found most interesting weren’t the obvious picks — Mr. Darcy, Casanova — but the number of odd choices. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus? We’re pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be terribly attractive. And Victor Mancini from Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke? Really? We puzzled over the piece for a while before concluding that lust works in mysterious ways. “The heart wants what it wants” is a cliché for a reason. So, in that spirit, we’ve created a necessarily subjective list of unlikely literary crushes. From stalwart, seemingly asexual supporting characters to all-out weirdos to evil incarnate, ten book characters we find improbably sexy are after the jump. Confess yours in the comments.
Sometimes the best and most engrossing stories are those about the most terrible and heartbreaking events. Inspired by the Guardian’s article on the joys of unhappy marriage literature, we thought we’d catalog a few of our own favorites (a few of which, we admit, overlap with the Guardian’s choices). These novels, sad as they are, are completely beautiful. It’s like not being able to look away from a car accident, hard as you try — intense grief is an incredibly captivating emotion, and as humans, empathy is rewarding and cathartic. Click through for our list of unhappy marriage literature that is nonetheless wonderful to read, and let us know which books contain your own most dearly held crumbling marriage stories.
Sometimes even the most literary among us need some suggestions. And who better to oblige than the authors themselves? Welcome to Bookshelf, wherein we ask authors to design us a fantasy library, giving us their recommendations for the perfect reading material on a variety of topics. This week, author Leslie Jamison, whose gorgeous and intense debut novel The Gin Closetfinally came out in paperback this week, suggests her favorite unlikely heroines in literature — fitting for a lady whose own novel follows a couple unlikely heroines of its own as they try to navigate this wild world.
And when we say ‘unlikely,’ boy do we mean it. As Jamison says, “Fairy tales introduce us to certain standard breeds of heroine: beautiful innocents, homely martyrs, and plucky tomboys. These heroines aren’t those ones. They’re vindictive or passive or both. They’re ugly or bitter. They’re unwed mothers. They’ve got chips on their shoulders. They’ve killed people or chased them hundreds of miles. They’ve slept with lots of men—or none at all—and they’re not afraid to admit it. But they’re also determined and ferocious. They make it hard to look away.” Click through to see Jamison’s list of unlikely heroines (and the works of literature they inhabit), and get ready to stare.
People say that the lines in your face are representative of the life you’ve led – as in, love your laugh lines because clearly you’ve had a good run of it – and maybe we’re starting to believe that’s true. This week, HTMLGiant pointed us towards our newest obsession – artist and author John Sokol’s “Word Portraits,” drawings of literary greats in which the lines of their faces are crafted from the very words of their own works. How metaphorically poignant! But more than that, they’re beautiful, fascinating and often spot-on. Just don’t actually try to read them – you may get lost somewhere in Toni Morrison’s hair. Click through to see a few of our favorite portraits, and be sure to check out the rest here and a few of their prices here.
Have you heard the news? Mean girls are, like, so over. According to Lisa Sessions Stepp, the writer who coined the term “alpha girl” back in 2002, published a piece in the Washington Post over the weekend exploring what happens when mean girls grow up. And guess what? It turns out that “Girls, even mean girls, can — and do — mature eventually.” It’s not exactly a revelation — but it is a good excuse for us to count down our top ten mean girls from literature, film, and TV. Check out our picks after the jump and add your own suggestions in the comments.
