An Election Season Read, or Re-Read as the Case May Be

Today's issue of The New York Times has an article noting that Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, "All the King's Men," is still a great read 70 years after it was first published.

"I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries," said Dwight Garner, author of the piece. "It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election."

Rape In Life and in the World of YA Fiction

I've written about Young Adult (YA) fiction previously, in large part because it is reportedly about the only literary genre experiencing significant growth in sales. As such, it has attracted a lot of attention and various established authors who previously ignored this segment of the market have started to write for it.

These are not children's stories. No topics are off limits and perhaps partially as a result of that, lots of adults are said to be readers of these books, too.

An Imaginative Plot Twist or "Cheating?"

Ok, I used that word "cheating" mainly to get your attention. There is no such thing as cheating in fiction, right? Anything goes. But then again ...

Writers often have trouble with plots. They develop a scenario and then, for one reason or another, can't figure out how to resolve it -- how to bring matters to a conclusion, or in the case of many short stories, to a satisfactory finish since conclusions aren't all that common.

"High-Minded Sex:" An Interesting Tournament Outcome

Literary Hub, an online aggregator, today announced the winner of it's single-elimination tournament aimed at selecting the best example of "literary sex writing" from an initial round of 16 samples taken from four different historical eras.

A passage from James Baldwin's novel "Giovanni's Room" took the blue ribbon after all eight judges weighed in on final round, Lit Hub said, adding that the decision to select Baldwin over Jeanette Winterson was "almost unanimous."

"High-Minded Sex:" A Curious Outcome With Sea Anemones

Literary Hub published the results of the semi-final round of its single-elimination "Tournament of Literary Sex Writing" today and the outcome was curious in more ways than one.

First, the contests' finalists, former American author James Baldwin and contemporary English writer Jeannette Winterson, were both describing same-sex encounters in the passages from their writings that were selected for the competition. Oh well, conventional sex between men and women is so very yesterday. Either a gay black male or a lesbian will be the overall winner. The Lit Hub judges can congratulate themselves on being about as politically correct as it gets these days.

Saving Chic Lit Through Experimental Fiction

I have recently been reading "All the Single Ladies," a non-fiction work by Rebecca Traister that, among many other things, celebrates cities as the best place for an apparently growing number of unmarried women to live.

"Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual  transactional services, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love," Traister says.

"High-Minded Sex:" The Erotic Eight to the Fornicating Four?

Today, Literary Hub announced the outcome of the second round of it's single-elimination competition for best depiction of sex in literature.  The starting point was what the service identified as the "erotic eight," which I assume means the outcome will be identified as something along the lines of "the fornicating four" -- as opposed to the more conventional "final four."

Today being April Fool's day, it is hard to know whether the decisions of the distinguished judges should be taken seriously, but having written up the first elimination round, I'll play along with the game. As was the case yesterday, the actual passages of "literary sex writing" will not be reproduced on this blog. But links will be supplied for the convenience of readers who can't resist seeing what the fuss is all about.