In Review: The Week of February 12th

On the Blog

We celebrated all kinds of love this week with artful love in The Videofag Book from Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis (Book*hug); reality romance in Suzannah Showler’s Most Dramatic Ever (ECW Press); sociopolitical love in an essay from Kelli María Korducki; observations on marriage from the contributors ofLove Me True (Caitlin Press); and a roundup of top 10 literary couples. 

Around the Web

~ If you’re trying to cope with the internet, take some gems away from Kurt Vonnegut and his Tralfalmadorians.~ Judy Blume has some sage advice for aspiring writers, including “Start on the day something different happens.”~ What would Holden Caulfield’s Tinder profile read? McSweeny’s imagines dating profiles of literature’s “complicated men.”

What Else We’re Reading

Julia just read M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Blank (Book*hug): “M. NourbeSe Philip’s career-spanning collection, Blank, taught me so much, not least of which is how little I know about the history of Black writers and writing in Canada. Philip shares that she is much better-known in the United States than she is in Canada, despite living, working and writing here for her whole career—the onus is on us to interrogate why this is. The many essays, letters and poems opened my mind and urged me to seek out further reading. The imageries of colonization as a rape and of colonialism as a continuous open wound are going to stay with me for a long time.”