In Which I Once Again Shill for the New York Times
I was surprised and pleased to see the lead of this week's NYT Book Review given over to a rather glowing review of a new biography of Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., one of the best, and most important, female SF authors. For nearly her entire career, Sheldon wrote and published as Tiptree, a mysterious author who, despite winning numerous awards and accolades, never appeared in public. You can read more details of Sheldon's life in the review, but her stories still hold up as compelling and occasionally chilling insights into human discrimination. Sheldon is not my favorite SF author, but I would not appreciate what SF is capable of without her writing. My favorite story of hers (and one of my favorite titles of all time) is her 1976 novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", available in this collection.
You can read more reviews and some excerpts from the biography here.
Jaime Hernandez' strip for the NYT Magazine continues to hold its place as the first thing I read in the paper every Sunday. In the most recent installment of his story, "La Maggie la Loca," Hernandez ties together 20+ years of his characters in a single panel. I have literally grown up with his characters, who have aged in real time, and Hernandez has managed to both appeal to my sense of nostalgia while creating a story that is completely accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work (though the existence of such ignorance confounds me). Additionally, Hernandez continues to amaze with his ability to move me with only a single facial expression.
The current installment is not yet online, but you can read all the previous installments of the series here. It represents graphic storytelling at its finest. I can't wait for it to be collected in an oversize volume, even if it only ends up being 20 pages long.
I don't know anything about tennis, and I care even less, but I will read pretty much anything written by David Foster Wallace. Helpfully, he provides much of the background information I need in his copious footnotes to this article on some player I've never heard of before. But it's still worth reading. Any writer who can get me interested in tennis (or, for that matter, lobsters) deserves a fucking Nobel, though they'd probably have to invent a new category for the guy. Nobel Prize in Parenthetical Remarks?
And check out this article on Outkast, possibly the best band of the decade, despite the fact that they're not really a band, and at least one of the members doesn't want to be in one.
You can read more reviews and some excerpts from the biography here.
Jaime Hernandez' strip for the NYT Magazine continues to hold its place as the first thing I read in the paper every Sunday. In the most recent installment of his story, "La Maggie la Loca," Hernandez ties together 20+ years of his characters in a single panel. I have literally grown up with his characters, who have aged in real time, and Hernandez has managed to both appeal to my sense of nostalgia while creating a story that is completely accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work (though the existence of such ignorance confounds me). Additionally, Hernandez continues to amaze with his ability to move me with only a single facial expression.
The current installment is not yet online, but you can read all the previous installments of the series here. It represents graphic storytelling at its finest. I can't wait for it to be collected in an oversize volume, even if it only ends up being 20 pages long.
I don't know anything about tennis, and I care even less, but I will read pretty much anything written by David Foster Wallace. Helpfully, he provides much of the background information I need in his copious footnotes to this article on some player I've never heard of before. But it's still worth reading. Any writer who can get me interested in tennis (or, for that matter, lobsters) deserves a fucking Nobel, though they'd probably have to invent a new category for the guy. Nobel Prize in Parenthetical Remarks?
And check out this article on Outkast, possibly the best band of the decade, despite the fact that they're not really a band, and at least one of the members doesn't want to be in one.
posted by Chazzbot at 7:36 AM
2 Comments:
That's a fascinating article on the Tiptree book.
Yeah, I'm thrilled that someone has written her biography, and that it's getting a lot of mainstream attention.
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