If you take your cues from the supermarket magazine aisle, manliness is pretty easy. Spend a few days browsing the selection and you’ll learn all about how you, too, can have ripped abs, a ripped chest, and ripped legs. You’ll be able to run faster at the track, lift more weight on the bench, and bike up mountains in no time. You’ll learn how to buy the perfect suit, cook the perfect meal, and be the perfect lover. But is a superficial checklist all it takes to be manly? Brett and Kate McKay, the authors of The Art of Manliness – Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues
Books
113 posts
For several weeks after George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was released, I debated over how to proceed with reading it. Should I go back over all the preceding books that I hadn’t read in five years? Or should I read it side by side with A Feast for Crows, attempting to match chapter to chapter in chronological order? Ultimately, I decided to just dive right in, with some help from the wiki to refresh particular names or details.
Structure:
The fifth book in the series was the result of a publishing fiasco where the sequel to A Storm of Swords was split into two books due to its unwieldy size. Rather than dividing it chronologically, the volumes were split by region and character, with Feast covering southern Westeros and Dance focusing on the events in the North and the Eastern Continent. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather lackluster fourth novel that consisted of mostly fruitless plotting and intrigue and devoted the bulk of POV chapters to unrelatable or uninteresting characters like Cersei, Brienne, Sansa, and the Greyjoys. Continue reading
The National Books Awards announced their nominees for the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature last Wednesday, including My Name is Not Easy by Debby Dahl, Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Flesh & Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and its Legacy by Alfred Marrin, Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt, and Shine by Lauren Myracle. Then, a few hours later, Chime by Franny Billingsley was added to the list, for a total of six titles. The addition of a sixth title was apparently due to “a miscommunication.” The miscommunication? Apparently, Chime was meant to be a finalist. Myracle’s Shine, about a teenage girl’s quest to find those responsible for the brutal abuse of her gay one-time best friend, was not. Instead of keeping all six finalists, as it appeared for the last five days they would, the National Book Foundation asked Myracle to withdraw herself from consideration in order to “preserve the integrity” of the awards. Continue reading
Today’s A.V. Club AVQ&A is about unhappy endings, and I’m curious to hear what the Crassholes have to say about this topic. Mainstream American films end happily virtually every time. It’s also a safe bet that the happy ending will involve a heterosexual coupling–we can leave that discussion for Crasstalk’s Gay Day. But let’s expand the discussion to television and literature as well. What are some of your favorite unhappy endings? What unhappy endings don’t work for you or feel as contrived and manipulative as a forced happy ending?
Ruth Rendell. Aka Baroness Rendell of Babergh. How many crime writers are there good enough they got a baronetcy for it? Not too damn many. She also writes under a pseudonym, Barbara Vine. She’s known for the Inspector Wexford series, and for many one-offs that feature crazy people. Psychopaths and sociopaths. She’s known for her sharp insight into human (and inhuman) nature, and writes crazy people really, really well. A Judgement in Stone? Brrr. A Demon in My View? Brrr. Tree of Hands? Very uncomfortable look at mothers and daughters. Continue reading
HBO’s critically acclaimed Game of Thrones TV series introduced George R. R. Martin’s brilliant A Song of Ice and Fire series to a mass audience who may never have been interested in fantasy fiction. But it also happened to air at a particularly auspicious time, with the first season ending shortly before the long-awaited fifth book was released.
Considering that the 1510-page length of A Dance with Dragons (available on Amazon
Anyone here not aware of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books? It all started innocently enough in 1993 with Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit. The brief stories were meant to comfort the reader’s jangled nerves. If you had a bookstore, you’d shelve them in Motivation/Inspiration/Self-help. Or maybe in Gift Books. The original editors were Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Continue reading
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of going with a friend to see Chinese-American author Lisa See give a lecture at a nearby library. (Woot-woot for library public lectures! Check out to see who your own public library is bringing in. I’ve seen people from Nobel physicists to Ray Bradbury.)
See is the author of several novels (most recently Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy) and a sort of biography of her family’s immigration-to-America experience, On Gold Mountain. She’s also the author of some fairly successful mystery novels (Dragon Bones, and others. You know where powells.com is, go look.) Continue reading
Each week we bring you a poet, some of their work, and leave the rest up to you.
This week’s poet is Anne Sexton. Also, this week, EthologyNerd is substitute-hosting for Jennywren.
Background:
Anne Sexton was the Courtney Love of 1960’s American poetry. Sylvia Plath, her good friend and main rival at the time, was winning awards and smiling dutifully at receptions; Anne was showing up drunk to receptions if at all, lighting hundred-dollar bills on fire in restaurants, having multiple affairs, and was generally considered the one poet you had to see read…again, if she made it and you could understand what she was saying.
Widely considered to have opened the door for modern “confessional” poetry, she tackled all manner of controversial topics in her writing, including menstruation, abortion, her mania and depression, and her rebellion against her straitlaced, WASPy, somewhat abusive upbringing. As her mental illness worsened, so did her personal relationships. Her decades-long marriage ended in divorce in the early 1970s as Anne descended further into prescription drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and her suicide attempts, of which there had been several in the past, became more frequent and more serious. Her last suicide attempt in 1974 was successful. Continue reading
A Hinds County, Mississippi Circuit Court Judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Kathryn Stockett as it was filed after the statute of limitations had run out. The suit claims that the author used the likeness and the life story of her brother’s nanny to write The Help without permission. The judge who dismissed the suit did not comment on the claim’s merits. Continue reading