A Woman in My Book Club Never Reads the Books. Can I Expose Her?
nytimes.com
A Woman in My Book Club Never Reads the Books. Can I Expose Her?
But it also feels true that the contemporary novel is having a crisis of morality. Not in the Aesop’s fable sort of way. But in the way that a novel is supposed to capture the specific, particular instability of human relations, and in that instability, it captures the truth about what it is to live in the world. And it feels more and more that
... See moreblgtylr.substack.com • A Dark Room on the Other Side of the World
If American (and Americanized) writing has been predicated on "values," it's also been highly interested in the judgment of those values: in adjudicating what is "bad" and what is "good" in a legalistic sense. This sense of literature as a theater of judgment didn't originate with post-war writing- -see again the nineteenth-century French
... See moreLyta Gold • Dangerous Fictions
When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.