I was going on about some novel I was reading and loving and she cut me off and asked, when was the last time you read fiction by a woman? And I honestly couldn’t come up with anything for a few minutes. It was a pretty shameful moment, in part, because I started wondering about early onset memory loss…
Chris Jackson/The Atlantic
As OnFiction readers will know, we have from time to time demonstrated a certain editorial affection for travelogue. Professional geographers also have a strong travelogue tradition–and a rather parallel tradition of field guides and guidebooks: stories of places visited ahead of time and reported back to travelers who might follow.
Kerstin Valentine Cadieux/OnFiction
The first psychologist-novelist we have asked to write for us is Elaine Hatfield, a noted social psychologist whose best known work is on love and its social implications. Her first novel was Rosie, about a young psychologist, Rosie St Giles, who has a temporary teaching job at the University of Hawaii.
It’s been said that these are the two most beautiful lines in Shakespeare, and I agree. They are based on a succession of synecdoches, a succession of expansions. In the first of these lines, “heart” stands not only for the life of the body but for the very core of being.
[I]n a world dominated by blurbs, tweets, and sound bites, we need more mailing lists, not fewer. Reader, I’m asking you to join me in a new mission—let’s save listservs! If you’ve got a favorite mailing list, e-mail me the name and topic or post a comment below—I’d like to learn about it even if it isn’t widely accessible or if it’s on a subject that I probably won’t care about (like sports).
Farhad Manjoo/Slate
You’ve done a damn good job of progressing from a few dumb rocks, flung out of the Big Bang, into monocellular creatures that learned how to make copies of themselves. Next, you grew into a complex, hyperaware species called Homo sapiens that extended its brain power through machines.
Abou Farman/Maisonneuve
Picture it: Beautiful June morning, sun peaking over view of pink-pearling, aqua-swirling lake from upstairs window, the world various, beautiful, new. I head for the stairs to make coffee. I put my left foot on the top stair. Fine. I put my right foot on the penultimate stair. Not fine. No leg there. (I just knew it would happen on these stairs. Thirteen of ‘em. That’s my unlucky number.) Halfway through freefall, brain clicks into action and remembers how to turn a plunge into a tumble. Still land hard and know one thing: This is not the coffee-pot station towards which I thought I had headed. Keerist. What the hell just happened? Think. Thinka thinka thinka.
Judith Fitzgerald/Globe and Mail
The rationale for this conclusion seems to be that traditional copyright protections make the production of enhanced e-books too complicated, meaning that only “auteurs” who produce, write, edit, direct, and score their own material will be able to create them. The faulty assumption here is that just because a particular technology (i.e. the ability to “mash up” videos, text, music, etc. to produce enhanced e-books) exists, everyone should be able to exploit it without restriction.
Steven W. Beattie/Quill & Quire
Vermeer was interested in science. He seems to have been one of the first painters to use a camera obscura, and he seems also to have been fascinated by the geometry of the perspectives he created. In the domain of painting he seems to me to have been interested in those matters about which Elaine Scarry (1999) wrote in the domain of prose fiction: how the artist invites the reader—or in this case the viewer—not just to glimpse objects, but to construct scenes.
