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On road trips, I’ve taken to stopping at caves. Cave systems may be the last undiscovered regions on earth, but I go to the tourist ones, the long-since-discovered and heavily trampled ones, the kind that only require a jacket and sneakers, not a hard hat, Coleman Lantern, or rope.
If we look at the wider socio-political context of Lolita blogs, in which the bodies of young girls are continually claimed, fetishized, vilified, it makes perfect sense that a young girl would relate to a character who has had the same done to her. I know I did. I know I still do.
We must thank Hermione Granger for the new trio of e-books from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling available for download on September 6. The books are called Short Stories from Hogwarts and provide a user’s manual for poltergeists, politics, heroes and even a guide (although unreliable) to the venerable Hogwarts itself.
I grew up in India’s heartland, 500 miles from Bengal, the state where I was born – and where one of India’s greatest poets lived and wrote. The poet, India’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, was a Bengali.
It’s interesting to think about whom cities choose (or not) to memorialize. Of course cities want to associate themselves with the celebrities who were born or lived within their limits. But statues are also places where, to borrow a phrase from Eula Biss, “a city’s imagination resides.”
August in the U.S. means football. It suffocates bar-stool conversation, seeps into family gossip. The whole business is as inextricable from the American identity as Protestantism. I can’t help wondering how an institution so all-encompassing has managed to dodge the pages of literary journals and publisher’s catalogs.
Dear non-orphaned and/or adopted authors, The orphaned and adopted would appreciate your consideration the next time you take away a character’s family just because it’s interesting. Sincerely, an adoptee.
Maybe it’s because I’m always hungry, but meals have always been some of the most memorable scenes in books. I drink tea from a porcelain tea cup while reading Oscar Wilde, and crave fried okra or salt pork between readings of Faulkner and Harper Lee.
Seminal children’s books are littered with girls who are defiantly un-girly. Just a few of the many examples are Harriet the Spy, who wears a toolbelt stuffed with spy supplies and Pippi Longstocking, the rowdy orphan with the strength of Popeye.
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