At Literary Hub, Jessi Jezewska Stevens reflects on the passive protagonist. “Passive protagonists can ruin things for any number of reasons. They resist and retard drama. They lack motivation. They’re weak. . . . There’s perhaps a special danger in writing a passive woman, a trope that rests on centuries of male underestimation of the weaker sex,” she writes. “Even still, I feel motivated to make at least half an argument for the passive, lazy lead, who, despite the wisdom of popular craft, I also find uniquely useful for cutting through the bullshit of a very troubled world.”
“Anyone who comes of age in this country and is not a straight white man automatically gets devalued. We’re made to feel like, ‘I’m not Dostoevsky. My story is small and niche.’ That it doesn’t have all the great drama of human life,” Real Life author Brandon Taylor tells The Guardian. “I could have written this book to be more sympathetic to the white gaze, but it would’ve been a worse book.”
At a panel with American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that she is “guilty of not looking for Latinx writers” for her book club. Though Winfrey said she will put more thought into her book club selections, she won’t shy away from controversial subjects. “I’m not going to play it safer, but I’m not going to wade into water if I don’t have to,” she said. “This has taken up a lot of my energy, a lot of [Cummins’s] energy, and it’s taken the attention away from the real reason I want people to read books.” Literary Hub’s Jessie Gaynor points out that Winfrey recently dropped Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa from the book club over “unsubstantiated” accusations of plagiarism that caused a “Twitter Book Controversy.”
Little, Brown employees walked out yesterday in protest of parent company Hachette’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir under the Grand Central imprint.
At Vanity Fair, Mike Jaccarino reports on the decline of the New York Daily News. “When I first started at the Daily News, there were a few hundred full-time journalists, plus tons of freelancers and permalancers. There were roughly 700,000 copies flying off of newsstands every day,” Jaccarino remembers. Now, one employee says, “There’s nobody left to lay off, and no parts to strip from what’s left of the paper. All that’s left is turning out the lights.”