On this day in 1953, an armistice between the US, China, and the two Koreas officially ends the Korean War. Since we’re still stuck in a protracted conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, we figured it was as good a time as any to discuss the books in the past century that spoke frankly about the horrors of war on the battlefield and in the air. After WWI, novels about wars became best sellers, as veterans became writers and began to attempt to make sense of what happened through the written word. Though we’re now in the era of spy thrillers and identity theft cases, it’s important to look back at the novels and memoirs that moved generations to rethink their past assumptions about war and conflict at home and abroad. When will we receive the books from the veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what were the war books that influenced you, readers?
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Growing up female is hard work; you have to be attractive, independent, smart, and funny, but not too challenging if you want to get a date. Or you could just be pretty, but that’s not as much fun, is it? The following is a group of women who have recently written memoirs about their tumultuous twenties and thirties, with the exception of Alexandra Styron, who writes about growing up in the shadow of her father, William, a founder of the Paris Review and the author of Sophie’s Choice. Anne Roiphe also writes about William Styron in her book, but through a decidedly different lens — that of a sexual encounter with him: “I am like a glass left on the bar, empty, a lipstick stain on the lip, a melted ice cube at the bottom.” All of these women write about the men who have shaped their lives during these confusing years, when they’re striving to make something of themselves while also attempting to find love and happiness along the way. As Lisa Belkin writes in the New York Times, “How does Tina Fey juggle it all?” How do all of these women?
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It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
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